(10.29.07) “We want to be free. We want to be free to do what we want to do. And we want to get loaded, and we want to have a good time. That’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party!” (Intro to Primal Scream’s “Loaded,” sampled from the 1966 movie The Wild Angels)
What if you could go back 20 or 30 years and experience the birth of dance culture again, without any idea how it would all end up? Imagine being black and gay in 1970s New York with seemingly no place to call home, but in Greenwich Village was the Paradise Garage, and it didn’t give a shit who you were as long as you came to party. Or imagine being a young punk rocker in Manchester in the early 1980s and strutting into the Hacienda, amphetamines crawling under your skin, and hearing the Happy Mondays for the first time.
Are you imagining it? Good. Now fuck all that nostalgia. Go buy The Glimmers’ Eskimo Volume V instead. It’s so much better than trying to remember someone else’s good time. This mix is really fresh and raw – it makes twenty-year-old songs sound like they were recorded yesterday, and contemporary songs sound timeless. There’s a remarkable consistency of tone from track to track, partly from DJ processing and remixing, but also from thoughtful selection. There’s a core sound here – partying has changed very little in the last three decades. What The Glimmers do so well is tease out the seductive physicality and sleazy glamour of dance music, from the glitz of disco to the glam of disco-punk.
The breadth of the mix is impressive without becoming tiresome – it’s Biggie Smalls, not Big Pun. And as with the Notorious B.I.G., there’s meat under all the blubber. How do you make LCD Soundsystem sound fresh again? Pair “All My Friends (Harvey’s Mix)” with Herb Alpert’s “Bullish.” How do you get out of the sleepy funk of Cultural Vibe’s “Ma Foom Bey”? Slip in the disco stomper “I Don’t Mind (Runaway’s Wurst Edit)” by Eugene Record. And, really, who was expecting Primal Scream’s “Loaded” to be followed by Shirley Bassey doing a cover of “Slave to the Rhythm” (remixed by The Glimmers themselves)?
But the hidden gem is Dissidenten’s “Fata Morgana,” Moroccan soul made with German engineering. In other settings, I might not have enjoyed this song nearly as much – after all, Dissidenten are pioneers of worldbeat, and isn’t that one of the genres that MySpace hipsters add to their profiles when they want to be ironic? But nestled between the old-school hip-hop of Mac Attack’s “The Art of Drums” and the coked-out samba of Pop Dell’Arte’s “Querelle (New Beat Flash Card Version by The Glimmers),” this song is devastatingly beautiful and (dare I say it?) uplifting. This is partying globalization-style, and The Glimmers don’t care what snarky hipsters think is cool because everybody is going to have a good fucking time. Damn right.
As my faithful readers know, I’m often critical of DJ mixes – I tend to hold them to impossibly high standards. So it’s good when something like this comes along and validates my fussiness. This is not just another superstar DJ compilation, good to the extent that you can cut lines on the case. It’s pure pixie dust. So put some up your nose, my friend. Feel your temperature rise, your heart rate quicken, your senses come alive. Party, and be free. You could be experiencing the birth of a new era in dance music, even if it’s only in your mind.
Eskimo Volume V is out now on Eskimo Recordings. [Purchase
