ARMAND VAN HELDEN
Ghettoblaster
Southern Fried Music/SPG Music
ANTOINE CLAMARAN
The Best of Antoine Clamaran Inside
Pool E Music/SPG Music
· The yin to the other’s yang – these two dance albums complement each other and will leave you breathing heavy on the dance floor.
People are naturally curious when they hear that you review records for a living. They become inquisitive and ask a lot of questions, like "What are you thinking?" But what a lot of people don’t realize is that records are heavily contextualized affairs and you have to understand the context before you can listen to the record. The suitability to be played in multiple contexts is what makes some albums great, but the usual context for a dance album and punk album are not usually the same.
Listening to a dance album alone, in your car, or even on the radio, is not like hearing it in a club. So, before listening to something like Ghettoblaster, I usually like to invite 40 or 50 of my friends and neighbours over to my garage. I’ll string up some Christmas lights, maybe "borrow" some A/V gear from the local high school and hang lots of tinfoil. Once everyone’s good and dancing, I’ll slip on the new Armand Van Helden record. If people stop dancing, the record doesn’t work. If more people flood the dance floor, it’s a hit.
The trick to dance music is that it’s meant to be noticed one minute and then disappear into the background the next. There’s a certain economy demanded of a pop song. Listeners are required to pay attention and we all wait anxiously for the "good part" which is why it’s hard to write a good pop song longer than three minutes. But dance music creeps into that seven-minute range, because you might have missed that good part, and repetition is required to co-ordinate your dance moves.
There’s a reason some refer to dance music, specifically house, as a content-free form, because the context of a dance record is not meant for the exchange of clever ideas. It doesn’t really matter that Armand Van Helden manages to create a vibe that oozes 1980s New York and Chicago and makes you want to find those old Mantronix records. Nor does it really matter that he successfully imbues numbers like "A Track Like Jack" with a pop edge. What really matters is that the frequency of clunkers like "Touch Your Toes" is surpassed by the number of bangers, like "NYC Beat."
For those who might be distracted in their dancing by Van Helden’s cleverness, Antoine Clamaran, the French House DJ du jour, offers two discs of smoothly mixed dance floor options based around his European hit "Take Off." Clamaran’s refined sound never gets bogged down in extraneous ideas or statements, just the unrelenting pulse of the bass and the beat of the drum. The first four tracks start off with Donna Summers’s inspired vocals. The percussion takes over, leading into the central "Take Off" mix, and then slowing down for the inevitable denouement.
Ghettoblaster allows you the luxury of keeping one ear open and is as easy to listen to from the floor as it is from a booth. Clamaran’s music simply dissolves into the night air, taking with it a sense of time, leaving no one richer or poorer for having heard it, simply exhausted from dancing.
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