Is there a French disco maestro more iconic than Cerrone? We think not. His tracks burst with the best the genre ever had to offer, and they stand up to endless airtime even this many decades after they were written and released. The Reflex knows this, and once again exercises impeccable taste and critical judgement on approaching such holy grail stuff as he offers up a pair of Cerrone revisions for the modern dancefloor. The fundamentals of both 'Look For Love' and 'Hooked On You' remain intact, with just some nipping and tucking and a little stretching where it counts to make these honey-coated jams even sweeter. You can't say fairer than that, can you?
Here comes an 11-track comp that epitomizes the sound of Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy's renowned breakfast show. 'Balearic Breakfast' has been running on Worldwide FM for years now, beginning and running throughout the COVID-19 pandemic so as to soothe and placate the anxious, plague-ridden listener with island sounds, sunsoaked balearism, drizzly disco. Spanning a "hodge-podge of chillout, spiritual jazz, deep soul, percussive house, quirky disco" and much more, you can expect a heady and 'ahh'-inducing escape with this one.
It's raining breaks! A hailstorm of jungle and drum n' bass has hit our shelves, and first of the droplets to settle (that is, onto our turntables) is FFF's latest album. Breaking away from the bangerized, 'Part Of The Order' is a junglist's fever dream, occupying the liminal spaces between rollage, hard heat and liquidation in equal measure. On it, tribal drum grooves ('Planet's Rhythm') and lo-fi breaks ('Disco Undertaker') weave between bursts of heavenly synthwork and existential vocal samples. Even weirdo art-pop jungle rears its head ('J.W.'s Experiment'), proving this one of the weirder ends to De Roos' catalogue.
The young Slam! label makes another great impression here with a second superb EP. Brock Out Crew rally show their skills with opener 'Hard Core Romance.' It fuses prickly and driving drum breaks with funky little riffs and a soulful vocal that soars up top. Ragga MC stabs and jerking bass finish it in style and make it potent both emotionally and physically. On the back side of this crucial 12" is 'Don't Dis The King' which is a hefty dance hall and jungle fusion primed and ready for some seriously loud plays on monstrous systems this summer.
Nat Birchall is one of the finest contemporary trumpeters around, He can do it all from solo albums where his instrument takes the lead in seductive suites of meditative jazz, to more cosmically mind work with a band via superb reggae fusions. After last year's well removed Ancient Africa he is back with a third all-solo outing that finds him playing all the instruments himself. It is an homage to the king o tenor sax, John Coltrane, as the title suggests, and included are classic 'Trane compositions 'Acknowledgement' from A Love Supreme, 'India' from his Impressions LP and 'Dahomey Dance' from Ole.
Although he made his name beefing up disco and boogie tunes, Casual Connection has used his Edits imprint - a spin-off from his clothing brand of the same name - to showcase tasty reworks of hip-hop, R&B and New Jack Swing jams. He's at it again on this fourth "45" in the series. A-side, 'Juicy Tells Him' is particularly potent, with the Aussie rework king cannily combining a much-loved rap acapella with punchy electronic beats, sturdy electronic bass and the kind of Korg M-1 organ riff more often associated with bassline or '90s U.S garage jams. He opts for an even heavier, sleazier, and dirtier sound on 'Tasty Work', a next-level re-imaging of a Missy Elliot classic that's as on-point and club-ready as they come.
Lady Blackbird's recent album Black Acid Soul was many things - a modern soul-jazz masterpiece for starters - but dancefloor-ready was not one of them. Because of this, the Los Angeles-based artist has decided to inaugurate a series of 'remix dubplates' featuring fresh revisions of cuts from the album. Number one in the series features two rubs from Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy under the Cosmodelica alias: a brilliant full-vocal remix in which spacey synth stabs, Clavinet sounds and clipped disco guitars rise above a sturdy dub disco groove, and a flipside dub that removes most of Lady Blackbird's fine vocal and emphasizes the trippy elements in Murphy's brilliant re-prodution (particularly the synthesizer sounds).
Back in the mid-to-late noughties, musical polymath Bruno Hovart (Patchworks, Voilaaa, Mr President, Uptown Funk Empire etc) helmed a revivalist dub reggae band famed for delivering dusty cover versions of soul, pop and rock hits. Hovart is a dab hand at making anything he touches sound scarily authentic, and much of Version Excursions, the band's now reissued debut album, sounds like proper Jamaican rocksteady, roots and ska of the 1970s. It's a simple idea, brilliantly executed, with highlights including their covers of 'Seven Nation Army', the Rolling Stones' 'Miss You' (reimagined as a toaster-sporting disco-reggae jam), and Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love'.