beyonce / jay-z - deja vu

- its the (insert note of caution here) hotness!

- tho it is very much the single of a huge star making a movie about a throwback girl group or something

- which reminds me, the dreamgirls teaser trailer is even better than "deja vu"!

- sometimes you get these songs - and the new aguilera is another - when you feel the only meaningful distinction in all of music is songs gilles peterson will play and songs he will never play in a million years even if they are some kind of nas/cinematic orchestra/os mutantes collaboration, and the hard reality is that all g peterson music, however divorced it is from the big man himself, feels faintly like a big fat cop-out

- but you know, i'm not here to be consistent, this is a hot cop-out. there are lots of them!

- f evans will be kicking herself with those scary boots



cos she didn't bother to release the similarly herbish "i dont need it" from her the first lazy album. forever letting relevance slip from that talony grasp!!!

omar / angie stone - stylin



angie stone was in the hot chick! lil missy is always going on about that one scene, in fact i just got her to describe it:

well at first rob schnieder is like, i have to go to the bathroom or i'm going to soak my panties, and that man looks at him, and rob says, 'i mean,.. my girlfriends panties... what? you don't pee in your girlfriends panties? what kind of a gay club is this?'

haha. also i quite liked that song with snoop from a couple years ago what she did, "i wanna thank u", which jazze pha's lazy ass cleverly reused for big's "nasty girl" this year. omar is the veteran of many many brit soul campaigns. he is so old that soul2soul actually wrote "back to life" about him when he had to be revived after a particularly full-on soul weekender. he has many classic songs, such as "theres nothing like this" and "say nothing". his falsetto is positively stellar.

so what i'm saying is this song has quite a pedigree! it also has a big powerful quik-ish grumble vs whine of a beat and two of the silkiest voices intertwining and an angie-led spacedisco style key change at 2:37 which just blows me away and takes the whole song up a level from low-key mp3 banger to endless repeat summer anthem, even if only me and trev will ever think so!

radio rips with facelift



jon e cash / lsg - up in the club

it's a diva dub! for a mad sec once i thought i came up with that! but it seems boy george and chaka khan have been making diva dubs since day dot. i guess in olden times they worked the same as rap/rnb's uber-annoying TV TRACK which i still dont really understand! did anyone ever say, even in the go-go 90s, thank god i can now hear busta rhymes' multi-track ad libs? did anyone ever play a tv track on the radio or in a club or anywhere?

(i hate 12s which have the tv track but not the instrumental and sometimes wonder whether there is a deliberate ideology going on, ie when some labels always give you the full works of instr/pella treats and some are so stingy that you're thankful just for a dirty version... what are they trying to say??)

in typical intense uk spod style jon e cash seems to be pushing some kind of diva dub purism, since there is probably no proper version of this meandering grimey piano track with occasional ladywailing in place of an actual vocal. i like diva dubs!

aftershock - pay attention

this is the song that was picked over "who are you" by 1xtra listeners to be aftershock's first single from their album. cruelly there was no 'pick your own fucking single you divs!' third option. both songs are pretty useless in terms of hooks, it's quite depressing! really their first big single should have been el rae's "old skool love", easily one of the five best brit rnb songs of the 00s. still, aftershock have made more rng records than anyone! i respect that.

alex mills - my house

she's still great! not really sure if she would ever be on 1xtra if target didnt fill in for heartless all the time, but so what, this rnb not grimey at all track has alex exploring high notes with a touch of n bedingieldish whimsy (sorry) and is great fun!

spizzongs 06

picks from jan-may in no particular order!