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1 min read
Both Sides
Read more . . . →Cable news finally booked a guest who disagrees with him.
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1 min read
Inner City x LOSTBOYJAY - Good Life
Read more . . . →I was on a crowded train when the vocal came in and I involuntarily smiled at a stranger, which is a lot to ask of a Tuesday commute. “Good Life” is one of the foundational records of dance music, Inner City’s 1988 Detroit anthem that basically taught house how to be joyful, and LOSTBOYJAY has taken on the nerve-wracking job of updating it. Reworking a track this sacred is a minefield, because the original is perfect and everyone over forty has a memory bolted to it. The good news is he treats it with obvious respect. Paris Grey’s original vocal,...
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5 min read
Big Beat, Explained: When Dance Music Got a Mohawk
Big beat explained: the mid-90s British dance music of Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy, built on distorted breakbeats and zero subtlety.Read more . . . →Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
IMANU & A Girl Named Sue - All U Need
Read more . . . →How is IMANU this far ahead of everyone and still not a household name? “All U Need” with A Girl Named Sue is him doing the thing almost nobody else in dnb pulls off, which is making a track feel weightless and crushing inside the same eight bars. It opens delicate, her vocal floating over a few processed chords, and you brace for a straightforward liquid tune. Then the low end arrives and it’s this warped, elastic bass that bends in directions your ear can’t predict, closer to a sound-design experiment than a standard reese. A Girl Named Sue is...
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1 min read
Skrillex - Bangarang (BRLLNT Edit)
Read more . . . →Let’s be honest about what this is. Someone took “Bangarang,” a track already welded into the brain of anyone who was near a speaker in 2011, and gave it a 2026 tune-up. The bar for a Skrillex edit is brutal, because the original is already perfect at what it does, and most edits of untouchable tracks exist so a DJ has a cleaner drop to mix out of. BRLLNT mostly clears that bar. It tightens the low end and modernizes the drums, handing that iconic yelping lead a heavier, cleaner floor to bounce on without touching the melody that made...
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1 min read
A Rush of Blood to the Head Turns 24. Still No Pulse.
Read more . . . →Twenty-four years ago today, Coldplay released A Rush of Blood to the Head. It still sucks. This was Peak Coldplay, which is like being the tallest building in Winnipeg — you can see it from far away but nobody flew there on purpose. The album gave us “The Scientist” and “Clocks,” two songs that have been emotionally weaponized by every university orientation video and Grey’s Anatomy death montage since 2002. Chris Martin played piano like he was apologizing for something he hadn’t done yet, and twenty-four years later I still don’t know what it was. The whole record sounds like...
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1 min read
Oliverse - Risk It All
Oliverse rarely misses, and 'Risk It All' pairs a yearning synth build with a drop that actually bites. That growl won't leave my head.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
HESTER - Brighter Days
HESTER's 'Brighter Days' is NCS uplift with real spine under the piano and pitched vocal chop. Perfect gateway drug, no snobbery here.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
Moby, Jacob Lusk, BLOND:ISH, Kiko Franco - Natural Blues (TECIE)
Read more . . . →There’s a moment about two thirds through where the beat strips back to almost nothing and Jacob Lusk’s voice just hangs there, and it gave me chills the first time. “Natural Blues” is one of the most recognizable samples in electronic music, that mournful Vera Hall field recording Moby built his 1999 version around, and reworking it is a genuinely risky move because the original is sacred to a lot of people. This version earns the risk. BLOND:ISH and Kiko Franco rebuild it as a proper Defected-style house record, four-to-the-floor and warm and made for a sunrise set, while Jacob...
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1 min read
Crowd Control
Read more . . . →Eight men in body armour, one woman with a thermos and a folding chair. Guess who’s winning.
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