(A photo-related NB: none of this Dragnet’s artists are prone to hogging cameras)
Jam City – Lower End Spasm and FACT Magazine mixes
The astute lords at FACT know their balls from their bagatelle, so it’s no surprise they’ve already come as close as you can to hailing Jam City as the messiah without making Jonathan Edwards stretch his rubbery lips wide and scream in apoplexy towards the heavens. The music Jack Latham makes sounds like grime – its bars are spartan and propelled – but shorn of its apoplexy, mostly wordless and frosted over into something more sorry than angry. As such, an alignment with techno was perhaps inevitable, but there’s more here – Funky house, South African kwaito and Chicagoan juke, while stand-outs ‘In The Park’ and ‘Island’ are still bass heavy enough to run with London’s Night Slugs boys (L-Vis 1990, Bok Bok et al). And boy he is – Latham’s just 20. Some serious futures here…
John Talabot – various tracks
(via MySpace)
As that photograph, found at ‘John Talabot”s MySpace page, might suggest, I don’t have any idea what the person behind ‘John Talabot’ looks like. For yes, it is a pseud – the name of a College in Barcelona, where Talabot seems to come from (though his MySpace page suggests simply "Congo"). Identity’s immaterial with music like this though, really – ‘Sunshine’ and his/her lux remix of Aufgang’s ‘Channel 7’ are pure repetition and endless four-four heat hazes that extend over you like the change in a day, from light to near-light to near-dark to pitch. House music from the humid tropics of a galaxy-big, basking brain.
Cloud Nothings – ‘Hey Cool Kid’
(via No Pain In Pop)
The lo-fi melee straddles continents now. It’s the new universal. Is it worse for that, or is this the way it’s supposed to be? That’s a question to leave hanging in the air, but it’s worth noting that if you keep an eye on the grappling occasionally one act will emerge through the throng, song raised in air clenched in triumphant fist. Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings are the latest to prevail, briefly, with ‘Hey Cool Kid’; its guitar chords suitably dusty, its chorus knotted together in smartarse ligatures. It’s fucking great for the next five minutes and in that sense it reminds me utterly of this.
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