The Singles Jukebox

No, it’s not some alternate spelling of Todd Terry, as your editor learned on an embarrassingly late date…

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[8.31]

Kat Stevens: When the alarm goes off, you clamber down from the top bunk and pull on the woolly reindeer jumper, the one that’s got red sequins on Rudolph’s nose. It smells of pine trees because you left it downstairs last week when Mum was putting up the tree. Big thick socks on, you creep down the slippery wooden stairs to the living room and switch on the telly. You watch the Christmas specials of the usual, gentle, claymation cartoons — volume knob set to Quiet As Mouse, as Mum and Dad won’t be up for two hours yet. Breakfast is the chocolate orange from your stocking, and after the fifth piece your eyes turn to the still-wrapped presents under the twinkling tree. The big square box doesn’t have a ‘To’ on the label, but the ‘From’ says “lots of love Santa“. Surely it’s not too much to hope that it could be for you? You know Santa is stupid really, but that didn’t stop you getting way too excited last night. You were dancing around the tree, until Dad reminded you that no presents would appear unless you went to bed. Santa might be ridiculous, but there’s still a part of you that believes that if you look up at the night sky, turn around three times and scrunch up your eyes in just the right way, the stars might turn into fairies who will come down and teach you how to fly. Twenty five years later and they still haven’t turned up. But now you know it’s because they’ve been in Norway all this time, making gorgeous, warm, magical techno for chilly nights like this one.
[10]

Josh Langhoff: After digging this song for the better part of 2012, it only now occurs to me that “Inspector Norse”, like the rest of the It’s the Arps EP, touches the most private place in my soul — by which I mean my ‘80s Genesis obsession. We’re talking hours, probably cumulative weeks, spent zoning out or journaling to (in order of acquisition) Abacab, Invisible Touch, and Genesis cassettes, memorizing the lengths of the two different percussion breaks in “Keep It Dark,” writing nascent crit explaining how “Second Home By the Sea” is “filler, sad to say, but not unlistenable,” drawing entirely unreasonable conclusions about illegal aliens and Brazilians. So now I’m gritting my teeth trying to figure out where I’ve heard Tony Banks using this lead ARP sound before. Maybe it’s an attack thing and not a timbrel thing, the little vibrato poinnnng whenever Terje hits a note? It’s like a mole on your back that you can’t see, am I right?
[8]

Sabina Tang: Begins sprightly, with a conversational melody that vamps and charms; builds to dancefloor efficiency without attaining (or aiming for) sweeping grandeur, only to break down and do it all over again. It’s impossible to remain bad-tempered while listening to this. If one has a churlish complaint, it’s that Todd Terje has for years distilled his mood-raising tonic with such reliability that one takes the effect entirely for granted.
[8]

Alfred Soto: As fingers punch major keys, inching closer to heaven, Terje returns to steady electro-squelch. He’d rather put us in sight of a climax rather than take us there. A neat trick, and only one guy gets away with it.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Last month I spent a lot of time with one of my favorite tracks, the Ernest Saint Laurent Moonfish Mix of Royksopp’s “Remind Me”. It’s what came to mind when I first heard this. Both tracks are from Norwegians, both hit a majestic peak midway, and both are blessedly free of Erlend Øye. But where “Remind Me” puts me in a profoundly wintry (read: solitary) state, “Inspector Norse” is a bit more social. Probably the way the topline gets more and more insistent as Terje sends it down lamplit streets to meet all the nu-disco accoutrements, culminating in that epic synthwash. That it ends so abruptly is tragic, but a subliminal staccato line in the second half shows there’s still fun to be had.
[7]

Will Adams: I could have done without the hi-resonance radio FX that crop up at the beginning and end, but the six minutes in between are so sublime that I will turn the other cheek. The midway point, where the harmony darkens and the bass switches from a blip to a pulse, is particularly amazing; the melody gets a new context under the minor key, sounding more aggressive even though it hasn’t changed during the transition. Terje’s attention to detail here is the real treat.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: A bubbly, interstellar roller-skate jam of the highest order.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: I think it might be the high flanged noises, like you would get from wubbling a thin piece of metal in the air, that makes me think of this as Techno For Kids. Or maybe it’s just all the happy-skippy melodies in the piece, or the fact that the bassline, relentless and chipper, never gets funky.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: In a world where dance music — no, I mean the parts which have been subsumed into the pop sphere — became so difficult on the ears and the feet, it is pure joy to step just outside that world to hear a lovingly-created, infectious, warming track that is so easy on both.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Dance music isn’t the problem. The problem is when it forgets the joy.
[9]

Iain Mew: In the absence of going to clubs and hearing “Inspector Norse”, I will settle for how well it works as a soundtrack to striding through the tunnels in King’s Cross St. Pancras underground station as an alternative measure. The answer is excellently, especially when the bit where the melody finally breaks from just circling lines up with the escalator up out of there.
[8]

Zach Lyon: The worst thing about Amnesty Week™ is the occasional realization that I missed out on an entire year of listening to a song like this, and now I’m one year closer to death. This is every track on Music for Shimmying Until You Pass Out, Vol. 1. Seven restless minutes of neon purple built into two notes. 
[9]

Andrew Casillas: I love quiet, contemplative electronic music as much as the next man. Luxury Problems is probably a top 10 album for me, and Burial’s Street Halo/Kindred is one of the defining EPs of the past decade. But oh man, sometimes you just NEED some dance music that’s this vivid. Every single beat sounds perfectly placed, and the melody changes shape more often than Play-Doh. The only bad thing about this track is that it has to end.
[10]