Vladislav Delay - "Recovery IDea" (Semantica)
Delay is of course well-known among bedroom house-ophiles for the diminishing returns of his dancefloor-oriented Luomo project, which began in 2000 with the spare, spacey, and brilliant Vocalcity and continued through a regrettable process of half-assed pop-flavored sweetening to arrive at the gauche, neon keyboard noodles of 2006's Paper Tigers. A songsmith Delay is not; he's most productive when suspended between ancient house music call-and-response hooks and washes of crackly digital atmosphere. So how fares his most recent return (literal in the case of this hard drive offcut) to the instrumental dub-techno that first made waves across various IDM discussion hubs at the tail end of the '90s, the stuff that was all crackle and no hooks? Wrapped in headphones—the good ones, not the chintz that comes pre-packed with your media player—it's pretty damn compelling, a squishy symphony for doors slammed shut by the wind in a parking garage overnight or feet tramping blindly through the snow. "Recovery IDea" is the sort of Autechre-esque slurp and clang that becomes weirdly affecting when a producer (as Delay does here) layers an atmospheric hum behind it, like a murmur of Erik Satie strings tying the stray noises into something almost human. Dancefloor remixes from Andy Stott, Fibla, and others add some drive to that slurp and clang, but their traditionalist techno rhythms offer the unexpected side effect of dampening some of the track's strange magic by tidying up Delay's trippy timekeeping.

Vladislav Delay [MySpace; Hear the track here]

Blood On The Wall - "Acid Fight" (Social Registry)
Liferz, New York band Blood On The Wall's album of throwbacks to the bratty murk I sieved from indie-rock zine recommendations while in high school, has been out for a minute, and I did enjoy it upon the first few listens before the Times New Viking album made it feel somewhat redundant. It was only after I saw it lurking on Matos' quarter-of-the-year-gone 'round up that I replayed album-closer "Acid Fight" and I'm glad I did. The blogosphere has taken the easy way out en masse in constantly comparing singer Brad Shanks (rightly more or less) to a pre-maturity Black Francis, but I'm gonna be contrary and say the first thing to come to mind was Weird Al commissioned by Touch And Go to parody the Jesus Lizard's David Yow, minus the cock-swinging. (At least in the first minute, Shanks panting heavy about something being wrong with his face, the kind lines that've launched a thousand Flipper tributes.) The song's mostly a lugubrious goof—in case the non-sequitur title and the invocation of Mr. Yankovic didn't tip you off—but the grungy riff (in the "less Possum Kingdom, more Slay Tracks" sense) and Ibold-bass seesaw back-and-forth with more of those golden-age indie yuks than you'd find in a mountain of modern folkies.

Blood On The Wall [MySpace]

Mann feat. Sean Kingston - "Ghetto Girl" (Sony/BMG)

I burned through the above two reviews fairly quickly before coming upon "Ghetto Girl" and needing to take a break because I was rendered momentarily brain-dead by Sean Kingston and his utterly shameless producer/groomer J.R. Rotem's latest plundering of my sister's old 45 collection for hooks. (What's next, the Go-Go's "Vacation"? "Goonies Are Good Enough"? A "Little Critter" story?) The beat's got the kind of tinny, crappier-than-an-actual-ringtone quality that gives a bad name to good ol' fashioned cheap-sounding Southern rap; baby-faced L.A. rapper Mann is the bold-faced name offering the girl-crazy rhyming ballast on the verses; but typically for '08 the whole point is Kingston's balls-out interpolation, which had Maura wondering if his "father was really a Z100 playlist from 1985." Rotem's borrowing is even more crudely blatant than the Ben E. King lift on "Beautiful Girls," and perhaps not coincidentally, I'm 75 percent sure I despise this more on the fifth play more than I did "Beautiful Girls" on the fiftieth. (It helped that I found "Beautiful Girls" charming 'til overexposure set my teeth grinding with every "suiiiiicidal.") Then there's that niggling 25 percent that has me playing it again, laughing through the wincing, and thinking that if the song becomes as inescapable as Kingston's smash, we can at least console ourselves that no crossover teen hip-hop acts have discovered the ack-ack-ack-ack hook inside "Movin' Out" just yet.

Mann [MySpace]

The Roots Feat. Dice Raw, DJ Jazzy Jeff, And Peedi Crakk - "Get Busy" (Def Jam)
Judging by the pre-release leakage from Rising Down, the Roots' rhythm tracks are now pushing for all their life against a suffocating layer of static and an smothering low-end closing in from the bottom. (Without booklet credits, I don't want to call that noise a "bassline" only to once again find out it's Mr. Tuba Gooding, Jr.) Philly breakout-who's-yet-to-break Peedi Crakk leapfrogged across a string of Roc-A-Fella tracks earlier in the decade that treated his sing-song flow like a sound effects record, groomed like so many Dash/Carter pet projects to wind up routed to the mixtape circuit and growing a chip on both shoulders. (Perhaps he missed the 2007 memo that all Philly rappers needed a Swizz beat to see any sort of chart love.) Surveying his rough decade alongside some hometown all-stars, he's less manic on the mic, but perhaps that's fitting given the track in question. The big beats on Peedi's old collabos hopped, skipped, and jumped; "Get Busy" trudges two slushy miles up Broad Street in big black boots because SEPTA stopped running at the first sign of crappy weather. Cold fronting against the windswept scratching from a guy who used to run afoul of Philip Banks and the band's immobilizing groove, Peedi flips up his hood, his middle finger, and offers lawyers and label heads the following unsolicited advice: "Fuck the Internet / Buy a baseball bat / Break a bootlegger leg."

Trance Rap Antidote [Cocaine Blunts]

D1 - "I'm Loving" (Tempa)
Like an Anglo-Caribbean cousin to the snarling Eastern Seaboard ish of "Get Busy," British producer D1 usually comes moanin' at midnight with the darker-than-the-rest sub-bass and thudding beats of dubstep; Tempa is one of the South London labels that initially mapped the increasingly confining parameters for the latest post-rave sub-genre barely distinguishable to American ears. But D1's always been a little softer than his pitch-black brethren, clinging to memories of clubbing fun during dubstep's long ban on anything that smacks of Chic-approved good times; whether "I'm Loving," much more suited to the daylight hours than anything I've recently heard from a dubstep producer, is merely the man following his particular muse or a concerted effort to rethink the genre's gloomy boom, it's quite welcome. D1's intercontinental syncopation is cooked from the kind of skipping Detroit techno hi-hats beloved by U.K. broken beat producers and the palsied carnival bounce of Trinidadian soca; add a fresh coat of bright synths and a sweet soul vocal hook and you've got something more suited to chilling at a beach house than skulking through the drizzle-soaked concrete-and-steel landscape suggested by crit-darling Burial and a grown and sexy twist on adolescent bassline heads reattaching house to the garage.

D1 [MySpace]
D1 - "I'm Loving [Boomkat sound samples]

Guillaume And The Coutu Dumonts - "Les Gans (Philip Sherburne Remix)" (Musique Risquée)
Music critic pal conflicts of interest abound, but I'd be fibbing if I didn't say this remix was my fave rave from this round of Single Spinning. Simple in the heart-tugging way good melodic, minimal techno should be, something often easy forget about given the genre's current glut: a fragile Brian Wilson chime and a Perlon-esque shaker-and-pop pattern opens to let in bass and synth before the track drifts from good to great on gliding, sad-eyed horn charts more Cinematic Orchestra than Ricardo Villalobos. Comparisons to anything remotely trip-hop are tricky given the tendency for potential listeners burnt on blunted beat comps to instantly recoil, and Sherburne's remix has too much snap to sink into the background. But more build-up or come-down than set climax, this would indeed fit on one of the early, excellent (no, really) Future Sounds Of Jazz comps quite nicely. (Don't snort, minimal snobs; the maestro Villalobos himself appeared on one of the series' later installments.)

Philip Sherburne Productions [MySpace]

Andrew WK - "McLaughlin Groove" (Fair Game)
When I was a small boy, my grandfather (may he R.I.P.) subjected his Catholic grandchildren to endless Sunday mornings spent not in church but around the TV for secular worship of various network news idols sermonizing from the magazine or roundtable mount. The only one of these windbags who could have possibly entertained a pair of grade schoolers cranky because they couldn't even enjoy whatever off-brand cartoons were being aired on UHF was John McLaughlin, whose bellowing, bellicose interruptions and radiant smugness were like watching one of your jerky prepubescent peers be plucked from the recess yard and plopped in a leather chair between Washingtonian insiders, instilling in us both a love for news and a love for shouting. Under the aegis of public radio arts'n'news show Fair Game, our beloved Andrew WK has recorded this cranked-up, karaoke-ready throwback to his I Get Wet-era sound in awed appreciation of that special "McLaughlin Groove," and while there's no reasonable explanation for two of my favorite loudmouths to have come together, I can only hope this hints at a possible duets record between strapping young Andrew and the aging Mr. McLaughlin right quick, before AWK has to posthumously put it together in an icky Alicia/Frankie style.

Andrew WK - McLaughlin Groove [MP3]
Fair Game [Official Site]

Wiz Khalifa's "Say Yeah" showed up on no less than three MySpace bulletins—and one message board thread—over the last week thanks to its video dropping on YouTube, and it's easy to understand why my online buddies might briefly boggle at a hip-hop tune that purloins the ecstasy/agony of the one-finger doot-doot from Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone," a song that made turn of the millennium trips to the mall a euphoric experience. (Even if it was hard to feel too loved-up when you were killing time as designated bag holder during your companion's layover at Wet Seal.) The clip gives Kalifa's tune a second go-round with the kind of spontaneous, unconscious street-teaming that gets desperate label marketing departments moist even if it's just a minor followup push more than a month after the song first hit blogs/sites whose descriptions do not always inspire you to leave the comfy confines of your RSS reader to access the download or sift your way through the daily pile-up of non-opinion for the stream. The fact that I'm writing about it a good two weeks after the video hit the Internet probably just means that too much MDMA has crippled my all-important blogger's response time, but nonetheless, I remain fascinated by "Say Yeah" all those days later, and for reasons beyond the context of music crit turnover in Web 2.0, the bargain Gorgeous Ladies Of Epcot Center video treatment (notable mostly for its shameless use of Photoshop lens flare), or Khalifa's flow (passable), and the views on leisure time and the distribution of personal funds expressed in his lyrics.

While most not instantly repelled by the hook will probably hear "Say Yeah" as a gimmick good enough to survive a two-week run before it's suddenly the victim of yet another unsentimental hard drive pogrom, within those 10 or 12 shrill notes I (half) hear the perennial thrill of young folks with samplers making weird-ass bricolage from seemingly incompatible sources and rewriting pop history in favor of all those sounds long since judged beyond the pale thanks to certain calcified conceptions of cool. If you think that's heady stuff to try and pin on a record by a baby gangsta riffing on a couple of Dutch producers who were almost outshined by their backup dancers' vinyl bikinis, well, I admit I may be obsessed to the point of foolishness by the potential in pop's continuing intercontinental cultural summit. (Even if this time, it's just the meeting of urban America and Amsterdam pop-trance.) But it's only because I believe these cross-genre hookups still offer a much better chance for surprise/innovation/dumb fun than the steady diet of Flo Rida that 2008 has given us so far.

Still, "Say Yeah" is not a wholly unexpected development in Eurocentric stunt sampling, especially when one of our favorite tunes of 2007 rewrote Technotronic for homecoming slow jammers and when this (which really deserves a few thousand words of its own) almost went unheard as it slipped between the SXSW notices in my inbox and when plenty of folks have outlined how pop radio has been slowly rewritten in the last half of the decade by rave's rule book. "Say What" is just the most blatant post-rave lift so far, and not coincidentally the cheesiest. Khalifa is a 20-year-old MC treading the line between major label breakout and mixtape nobody who currently lays his head in Pittsburgh, making him barely cognizant during the heyday of Ya Kid K but a ripe 12 when Alice Deejay hit, his musical brain (like that of his 20-year-old producer) just malleable enough to be by influenced whatever radio/video happened to be bumping during the peak of trance's brief infiltration into U.S. pop, when tunes like "Never Be Alone" were called up (down?) from weekend nights spent broadcasting live and direct from your town's bridge-and-tunnel hotspot, when Paul Oakenfold had annexed huge swathes of rack real estate in big-box music sections.

So "Say Yeah" is, among other things, less a future-focused Netherlands-to-Pittsburgh conference call than a shameless celebration of holding onto grade school taste by two guys old enough to cast primary votes and not yet able to get into 21-and-over nights, and that juvenile vibe, which hangs over every minute of "Say What" (and other songs of its ilk), may be what's so off-putting to many listeners. (Trance isn't exactly the sound of modern maturity to begin with.) Tip, Phife, and the gang may have actually blared Archies records rather than jazz sides from kiddie turnables for all history knows, but for certain hip-hop fans, the important thing was that they had put away childish things by the time they were cutting their own tunes post-graduation. And unlike Timbaland hunting up Abdel-Halim Hafez or even Bronx bombers refashioning German art-rock, "Say What" doesn't get a pass from old heads because it's A.) is pretty crude (even if the perverse side of me wants to argue the Alice Deejay sample's deployment is no blunter than "Planet Rock" or "Big Pimpin'" once you're familiar with the originals) and B.) panders to high school kids (and Internet dwellers) with a big hunk of a known quantity despised by the self-serious rather than going Akai alchemical on something more outre. Listening, you can almost see the ashen looks on aging faces, but time and pop's merciless rate of talent turnover means naysayers should know by now that anything and everything may eventually end up devoured without prejudice by novelty-hungry tween hordes.

But while I'm generally in favor of pop shrugging off acceptability with a don't-give-a-fuck brutishness and while I'm also an unrepentant fan of novelty and juvenalia, "Say Yeah" is, unfortunately, only just OK as these things go, meaning it's hard to grumble about 21st-century ephemera addicts who've already stricken it from iTunes. As someone who once tried to Quixotically convince alt-weekly readers that they should give DJ Sammy some shine, I don't share the position that this trendlet represents a Euro-axis Of Evil threatening hip-hop's way of life. I know the song's heart is in the right place. But the high-speed hook never meshes with the down-low hip-hop groove, only getting interesting/tolerable during the tingly half-time breaks. Had those moments been stretched out over a full 3:00, "Say What" might have made for a decent, techno-tinged mixtape track that would utterly lack the look-at-me value producer Johnny Juliano alighted on the moment he found a copy of Who Needs Guitars Anyway? in the back of his closet next to his middle school yearbook.

And since repeated exposure turned "Never Be Alone" into anthemic water torture, the off chance of "Say Yeah" escaping into heavy rotation—either because of viral whatever or because Kanye's relative good taste primed the pump—would means this Frankenstein could turn Pronti, Kalmani, and DJ Jurgen's keyboards (one of trance's great mysteries being how it took three dudes to come up with one riff) into a generation gap irritant on the level of your "Crank That" variation of choice^*. For the second time. Which I'm not so sure about. Because above and beyond enjoying producers pulling off seemingly incongruous sonic combos and watching high school kids bait their elders, I enjoy these songs because of the immense pleasure I derive from both rapping and big, stupid synth hooks and would prefer to not have "Say Yeah" turning my opinion/inspiring idle thoughts of suicide six months from now. And yet even with with that worry in mind, I'd still like to close out with five pop-dance tunes that I'd love to hear some enterprising Fruity Looper have his or her way with because of their as yet untapped potential for making our charts a better place.

1. DJ Sammy - "Heaven"

Kinda platonic/interchangable as far as trance riffs go, but nonetheless waiting to be pitched down to booty-pop tempo.

2. Da Hool - "Meet Her At The Love Parade"

The main hook positively sophisticated compared to "Better Off Alone."

3. Rollergirl - "Dear Jessie"

Perhaps more suited to an R&B cut.

4. Aqua - "Dr. Jones"

and

5. Vengaboys - "We Like To Party"

They don't even have to be good. I just want someone to have the stones to take this sound all the way.

Wiz Khalifa [MySpace]
"Say Yeah" [YouTube]

(^* Interestingly, while elderly listeners across a variety subcultural affiliations seem to be giving this song the gas face—hardly surprising, since I recall Alice Deejay clearing not a few rooms full of Neutral Milk Hotel and Nas fans alike upon initial release—younger indie kids do seem to be embracing Kalifa's tune to an extent that they don't seem be repping for, I dunno, the Pop It Off Boyz; whether they're enjoying it as a goof or because they're blog-era omnivores who hear no difference between Urb-approved Frenchies and the kind of cornball poppers-fodder that gives minimal techno fans agita, nostalgia seems to be at least partly at work, proving once again that any pop reputation can be at least partially rehabilitated by good ol' warm childhood memories.)