Oh yes. It’s finally here. That new Justice album you’ve been waiting on for damn near five years has arrived. And yes, it’s good. Sure, that electro/rock & roll fusion isn’t as groundbreaking as it was when Cross, er, crossed-over and took both the dance and indie scenes by storm in 2007, but now the sound is pleasantly familiar and listening to Audio, Video, Disco feels like catching up with an old friend. It’s mellower than you remember, not as edgy or dancey as its predecessor, but the Justice you love is still there.You heard the first single Civilization way back in April, so you know what to expect, but here are a few more previews, as if you needed convincing.
A full four years after dropping their landmark debut album “†” the french house duo is back with “Civilization”, their first single off new album “Nebulae” that’s set to be released later this year. And I do have to say, it’s a beast. From those first four stabs you know it’s on. “Civilization” is one of those rare “next level” tracks where an artist takes their already successful formula and pushes it to even greater heights. Think Fincher with “The Social Network”, or the exact opposite of whatever the hell it is that M. Night Shyamalan has been doing since “The Sixth Sense”.
As could be expected Adidas snapped it up and got David Beckham to run around cones and up and down some stairs to Civilization’s chugging, deliciously grungy beat. If the rest of the songs off Nebulae are this good could we be looking at the best house album ever? Hummm…
The polls have closed, the votes tallied up and its finally time to present the The Beatery’s top five dance music producers of the 00’s! You’ve heard all the tracks and read a bajillion words about these guys so I’ll keep this short, but just in case I linked back to their respective STYTYCB posts. We’ll count down from five to one.
Super-awesome cover art by my new Bolivian gf Paola Lambertin (who I think will be personally offended if Daft Punk doesnt win this).
So I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not but we’re doing this little contest here at The Beatery trying to find the best producers of electronic dance music of the 2000s. Somewhere along the way (I think it was at Tiesto of all people…) it dawned on me that: fuck, I should really do a podcast with these Dons of Dance, these Behemoths of Beats, these Saints of Synths* all mixed together!
*Thank you, thank you, I’m here all night.
So I came up with some quick rules for this “So You Think You Can Bump” podcast:
Every contestant would get one, and only one song.
I would not be trying to include everyone’s “biggest” or “most memorable” or “definitive” track. Way too hard to put together anything with flow, and quite frankly, I’m sick to death of most of those*
I would not use a track (or the same mix of a track) that was ever on any of our sets. These guys are so prolific let’s hear some new stuff**
Any mix, re-mix, cover or mashup was fair game as long as the SYTYCB artist was somehow associated
* This is not to say I COULDN’T use one of these, it just wasn’t the priority.
** Like every good set of rules one of them needs to get broken, and for me it was number three. I used one track that appears elsewhere in a mix on this site. Can you catch it? It’s pretty obvious…
So with these rules in hand and 15 holes to fill I felt like the manager of and All Star game. Who do I start? When do I use the heavy hitters? With so many of these guys being multi-dynamic producers, what style should I have them represent? With so many different styles how do I get them to gel together?
Well, the need for flow made most of these decisions pretty easy. And now that the dust has settled I have to say I’m pretty excited about this mix! It’s not often that you have an excuse to only use the best producers in you set, and wow, what a result.
I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I did making it! It’ll be a nice way to look back at an incredible period of dance music:
So for those of you aren’t avid followers of my status updates on Facebook (one of these days I’ll graduate to Twitter… I’m a classic “late majority” guy) I had my first gig down here in La Paz, Bolivia last Friday night! How’d it go? Well, you kinda got to understand the dynamics of the club a bit. We will defiantly get there, but first, I wanna share the ridiculous story of how I actually GOT the gig in the fist place.
Getting gigs as a DJ is other worldly hard. Unless you own a club/series of successful parties, are friends with the former, or produce music and are backed by a label your path to the decks are full of more perils, pitfalls and booby traps than Eddie Murphy’s quest for “The Knife” in “The Golden Child”.
I’ll sprinkle in some the tracks I played that went over well throughout the post:
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