The Singles Jukebox

I’d like to pretend that it is in some way appropriate that our penultimate post for 2K10 is a song by the former keyboard player from Kid Creole and the Coconuts…

[Video][Myspace]
[7.62]

Martin Skidmore: Back after 27 years away, and sounding odd. Yes, it’s still Latino music and yes it’s sort of dancey, but it’s a weird track, Coati sounding sort of sinister over a twisted version of some sort of Latino dance and something like buzzing techno. Hard to sum up, but I can picture it soundtracking a Latin American Twin Peaks in my head. Excellent.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Welcome back, guys! Where’s the Kid?
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: Wow: he made a track. Not a song, not a record; dance-fan lingo for something so purely intended for dancing and deejaying that whether you can sit and listen to it is sort of beside the point. The methodology is similar to the kind of 12-inches Coati Mundi was making with Kid Creole and Dr. Buzzard’s before (keep the arrangement moving and lively) even if the means are more modern: hard, bare rhythm track with various grinding oscillations acting as decoration, along with occasional woodwinds, voices, and FX. It’s a Latin-flavored dub, something I don’t believe I’ve heard nearly enough of.
[8]

Frank Kogan: Afro-Latino drumming, perhaps the most public music in the world, sounding here as if it were created in someone’s brainwaves and injected directly into the listener’s bloodstream, where it bubbles nervously. Gets under the skin, as they say.
[9]

Chuck Eddy: The rest of Dancing For The Cabana Code In The Land Of Boo-Hoo is a likeably goofy and half-finished kind of electro-salsa chant-dance music making occasional statements about dogs and debt and apple-polishers, but this very anomalous cut (also a 12-inch B-side) is… well, quite possibly as intense, energized, obsessive, and ominous, with as much red blood flowing through its veins as any “electronica” I’ve heard in the past two decades. I don’t catch all the words (guess I could look them up), but the music resides at the precise juncture of Dinosaur L’s “Corn Belt” (i.e., Arthur Russell when he was awesome not boring), Sven Vath in his weird old Teutonic 16 Bit/Off days, and probably some early Chicago acid-house by Phuture or Bam Bam — if those guys had all recorded in South America. I have no idea if that’s what the man a/k/a Andy “Sugar Coated” Hernandez was going for here, or if it’s mere coincidence (maybe he wrote it 25 years ago himself??); also have no idea if those sorts of oddball ’80s reference points would necessitate techno experts to dismiss this as “dated.” If so, they’re nuts, because from the era of such music, judging from everything I’ve heard since, techno has been in constant retreat. Until now, maybe.
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: James Bond meets dark disco with some half-hearted toasting. If it’s better than that sounds, there’s still an upper limit to how good that can get.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The best of Louis Prima’s Jungle Book, combined with the jungle drum setting of my childhood electronic keyboard and mashed up in a favela for all of yr Ibizia needs. Kind of awesome in a pan-global beatdown kind of way.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: Killer roots house from a dude whose roots run much deeper than house. Just the kind of thing I want to hear at peak time, when my senses are enflamed and my body is completely sublimated to a throbbing, slightly unforgiving beat. What’s unexpected is how precise and modern it all sounds, excepting perhaps a certain amount of hard-house malingering between 3:15 and 3:45. Still, if this dude was 18, we’d probably all be giving it a [9].
[8]