Review: Despite the title there's no particular discernible 'summer' theme to this latest batch of re-edits from German maestro Alkalino, but that's probably just as well - after all, no one wants to hear 4/4'd up remakes of holiday 'classics' like 'The Birdy Song' or 'Agadoo', do they?! Instead the Audaz boss serves up another typically classy bunch of reworkings, drawing on sources that include Change ft Jocelyn Brown's 'Angel In My Pocket' ('I Remember All So Clearly'), Lenny Williams' 'Midnight Girl' ('The Music Plays And Plays'), Central Line's 'Walking Into Sunshine' ('I Got To Get Away') and Talking Heads' 'Seen And Not Seen' ('A Larger Forehead'), to name but a few.
Review: Although Alkalino has re-edited all sorts of music over the years, disco, boogie and Italo-disco tracks have always been his bread and butter. He's taken a different path on his latest release, offering up 'Transgenre Edits' that touch on a wide variety of sounds and styles. There's much to admire throughout, from the 105 BPM conscious soul-goes-dancing headiness of 'Songs That I See' and the weirdo disco-rock-goes-Italo-disco throb of 'Angry Eyes' (a take on a legendary 1979 by Skatt Bros) to the effervescent jazziness of 'Sad Sax' (an edit of the track sampled by Mr Scruff on 'Get a Move On'), the muscular, mind-mangling synth-disco throb of 'Angel Dust' and the bouncy Tango-disco rush of 'Funana'.
Review: Portuguese producer Alkalino has been relatively quiet of late, at least by his own prolific standards, so it's hardly a surprise to find that his return to action is an album-length collection of tried-and-tested re-edits with a firm focus on the dancefloor. He begins with the bass-heavy Afro-disco bounce of 'Superstition', before variously serving up post-punk disco throb-jobs ('Warp'), guitar-laden disco-rock ('5 Letters'), percussion-laden global disco excess ('Kingston Town'), tooled-up Zimbabwean excellence ('Lion of Zimbabwe'), what sounds like a synth-laden William Onyeabor revision ('Be My Angel'), filter-heavy Afro house-not-house ('Just Begun') and colourful highlife reworks ('Oh Deus').
Review: With 17 tracks on offer there's no room here to list the source material for every track on this latest re-edits selection from the ever-busy Alkalino, even if we could identify them all - which we can't, because it's fair to say he's dug really deep here to find some gems. No guilty 80s pop pleasures here, just obscure disco, Italo and boogie nuggets expertly repolished to suit modern dancefloors, the arguable exception to that rule being an excellent take on the Detroit Emeralds' 1972 soul/funk classic "Baby Let You Take Me (In My Arms)", here reinvented as "Let Me Kiss You". Other highlights include the lazy, sensual "Feel The Music" and the dreamy jazz-fusion of "Ghetto Blues".
Review: This is the fourth volume in the series, so you should have the idea by now: Audaz boss Alkalino revisits his youth by taking on pop hits (mostly) from the late 70s and 80s, often reworking the most unlikely source material into dancefloor gold. This time out, though, he's cast his net a little wider, with sources including Jimmy Soul's 1963 calypso hit 'If You Wanna Be Happy', The Chordettes' 'Mr Sandman' from 1954 (an unexpected standout), Sixto Rodiquez's 'Sugar Man' from 1970 and Johnny Cash's 'I Walk The Line' from 1956, as well as the more par-for-the-course likes of The Clash's 'Guns Of Brixton', Stan Ridgway's 'Camouflage', M's 'Pop Muzik' and Paul Hardcastle's '19'.
Review: Number three in a series whose title was self-explanatory to start with, so you should have a pretty good idea what's going on here as re-editor par excellence Alkalino makes free with 11 more nuggets from days of yore. Getting the treatment this time are Prince's '1999', Michael Jackson's 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough', Dire Straits' 'So Far Away', Rocksteady Crew's 'Hey You', Journey's 'Don't Stop Believing', King's 'Love And Pride', Visage's 'Move Up', The Smiths' 'Bigmouth Strikes Again', The Stranglers' 'Always The Sun' and a couple of unidentified cuts (one of which sounds like it might be The Human League while the other has a Front 242/Meat Beat Manifesto-like feel)... some surprising sources there for sure, but they're all handled with Alkalino's trademark aplomb so listen with open ears!
Review: Lino Rodrigues, better known as re-editor extraordinaire Alkalino, takes us on another trip down Memory Lane to the 1980s. Coming under the scalpel for a spot of cosmetic surgery this time out are (in order) Prince's 'Gett Off', Laura Branigan's 'Self Control', Oran 'Juice' Jones's 'The Rain', Madonna's 'Everybody', Marillion's 'Kayleigh', AR Kane's 'A Love From Outer Space', Prefab Sprout's 'When Love Breaks Down' and Kajagoogoo's 'Too Shy'. It's an eclectic selection for sure, and which tracks hit hardest for you will probably depend on how you feel about the originals, but give all of 'em a whirl because some of the reworks are quite radical in approach. And yes, we known 'Gett Off' is from 1991 but let's not get pedantic, eh?
Review: Alkalino's dug pretty deep for this latest re-edits EP, with our disco detectives only able to identify the source of two of the four cuts. The two we can't place are 'Mad Words', a lightly tropically-infused disco shimmy with an androgynous spoken, Euro-sounding vocal and "whoo-oo-ooh" backing vox, and 'Solitude', an instrumental comprised of fluttering guitars, organs and some killer "pyoww!" stabs. Elsewhere, 'It's Not In Your Eyes' reworks the cod reggae of Boz Scaggs' 'Love Me Tomorrow' (1976) into a midtempo, piano-led disco groove while Change's Jocelyn Brown-starring 'It's A Girl's Affair' (1980) gets reworked as 'People Be Aware".
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