Do you know Angie Brown even if you think you don’t? She sang the hook on Bizarre Inc’s I’m Gonna Get You back in 1992, one of those rave vocals that’s been sampled and rinsed for the better part of thirty years, and here she is singing it again over a brand new Illyus & Barrientos house production. The Glasgow pair are Toolroom regulars who know precisely how to build a groove for a peak-time floor, and handing that voice a modern low end is the sort of obvious-in-hindsight move that makes you wonder why nobody got around to it sooner. Brown sounds incredible, by the way. No autotune scaffolding, no studio trickery holding her up, just a real singer who still has every bit of it three decades on. The bassline struts, all hips and swing, and the drop leans on the vocal and lets it lead instead of burying it under a screaming synth. There’s a piano stab in the back half that is pure 1992 and lands like a direct hit of serotonin, the kind of sound that makes people who weren’t even alive in 1992 feel nostalgic for it. It’s a house record that honours where it came from without freezing into a museum piece. Old and new shaking hands, and neither one condescending to the other.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.