Front 242

Same deal: ten songs at random…

• Amii Stewart, ‘Knock on Wood’, off of the Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collection: Gotta love the 80’s, and it’s fairly obvious that I do, given how many 80’s-era one-hit-wonders pop up in these lists. Another promotional dj-only remix from Hot Tracks. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any appropriate links on the iTMS.

• Eurythmics, ‘I Need A Man‘, off of Eurythmics Greatest Hits: I’m a big Eurythmics fan, but this is one of my all-time favorites of their songs. I’m not quite sure if I’d definitively call it my favorite, but it’s definitely in the top three (along with Love Is A Stranger and Missionary Man).

• Front 242, ‘Headhunter (Xingu Hill)’, off of Headhunter 2000: Headhunter 2000 is a two-disc collection of remixes of the classic Front 242 track. Some of the mixes are really good — this one, while not unlistenable, isn’t one of my favorites. It strips away too much of the melody, leaving little more than a series of distorted bleeps and bloops over chopped up samples of the original vocal track.

• Random, ‘Rock Me’, off of Technorave 3: Technomania: I’ve got to admit, I’ve still got a fondness for early-90’s techno — back when techno was techno, and it hadn’t split up into the many different styles of electronic dance music that collectively fall under the ‘electronica’ label these days. Very simple and very repetitive, but somehow much of this stuff still works quite well for me (though, admittely, this one goes on a bit longer than it really needs to).

• Lo-Fidelity Allstars feat. Pigeonhed, ‘Battle Flag (Radio Edit)’, off of How to Operate With A Blown Mind: The Lo-Fidelity Allstars team up with Pigeonhed to udpate Pigeonhed’s single. This is one of my all-time favorite dance tracks — and, in an unusual situation, is one of the few songs where I like the radio edit better than the album edit. Where the album track says “motherfucker”, the radio edit, rather than backmasking or just dropping the volume levels of the vocals for that word, electronically stretches out the first letter of the next word in the song. It makes for a really cool effect, and a radio edit that for once doesn’t sound emasculated when compared to the unedited album track.

• L.A. Style, ‘L.A. Style Theme’, off of L.A. Style: More early-90’s techno. L.A. Style’s one big hit was James Brown Is Dead (which at one point could be found on nearly every single techno compilation ever), though they did have a couple more minor hits with Baloony and I’m Raving. I’ve got a very fond place in my heart for this album, as James Brown Is Dead is actually the first real techno track I can remember hearing, and it started getting me into the techno rave scene.

• Marmion, ‘Schöneberg (John Acquaviva)‘, off of The Sound of Superstition Vol. 5: Modern European techno from the Superstition label. I picked this compilation up solely because I’ve found over the years that for some reason, Europe (especially Germany) seems to be the only region where “old-school” techno is still in vogue, and much of their electronic music still has strong roots in the early-90’s techno styles. This track isn’t anything special, but isn’t bad background, either.

• ‘I Love Cats’: I have no idea who does this or where it came from. I do know that it’s sick, wrong, and very funny. Lyrics and download are available on this post from last March.

• Sonia Dada, ‘Paradise‘, off of Sonia Dada: I first heard Sonia Dada on one of Seattle’s local rock stations, 103.7 The Mountain, where they were giving ‘You Don’t Treat Me No Good‘ heavy play. I really enjoyed that song, so went searching out some more of Sonia Dada’s work. This is a band I really need to pick up some albums by, rather than just the few tracks I have downloaded so far — musically they’re definitely good, but it’s the strong singing and harmonies that really catch my ear.

• Jason Webley, ‘Pilgrim II (Live)’, off of The Halloween Special 2001: Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of local Seattle artist Jason Webley. This is a live recording from his 2001 ‘Deathday’ show of a song which became ‘Counterpart‘ on the album Counterpoint. While Jason hasn’t officialy released any live albums, he doesn’t seem to mind the distribution of the bootlegs that have been recorded so far — you can find the ones I’ve collected so far ~~on my server here~~.

And this week’s bonus track:

“Haunted When the Minutes Drag” by Collide from the album Vortex (2004, 7:43).