So here we are now in this eclectic, post-millennial age where nothing is new and all the different musical flavours are yours at your fingertips as you casually scroll through that huge collection of aural gigabytes that sits in your pocket. It’s a world, we’re told, where styles mix and coalesce, where over 50 years of music is yours at the touch of button. So here we are now – entertain us.
Of course, such theories are rendered utterly useless unless the true nuggets are sifted away from the dirt and it’s at times like these that a collection of music like Blood Everywhere’s Down With The Kids arrives with the good timing of the cavalry arriving to save a beleaguered wagon train. Ian Wade – the not-so-sinister Mr Big behind the Blood Everywhere brand – is a man who knows a thing or two about a tune and how to pump it up into a swaggering, electronic dance monster.
Wade’s M.O. is simple yet devastatingly effective – take the best elements of the last 40 years or so of dance music, run it through a quality control filter and create a world of your own making. This is pop the way that it should be: joyous, free and unencumbered by the concerns of the outside world or perverted in the name of light entertainment.
That’s why elements of funk sidle up to the throb of techno to cop a cheeky feel on the opening title track as elsewhere pulsating basslines head straight for the feet and hips to leave the brain to wander off on some intoxicated tangent. Witness the hedonistic temptation that is ‘Let Me Enter You’ and the glorious sleeze of ‘Ride’, a track that’s easily suited to soundtrack your next S&M party while the strict precision and Euro homage of ‘Nothing To Lose’ evokes the image of a mechanoid John Barry.
But there are textures at play here too and the late night comedown of ‘Killer Rave Drugs’ and the – ahem – glacial washes of ‘Polar Pick-Up’ do much to offer respite as they do another side of the skills at work here.
Crucial to the success of Down With The Kids is that is does what it’s supposed to do: make you dance. This isn’t the tuneless, humourless and utterly sexless jiggery-pokery that set the digital world alight at the end of last week but an unashamed party monster that’s in all too short supply in these increasingly downbeat and downturned days. Slap it on, whack it up and hit the floor. Just do it – you know it makes it sense.
