It must be summer, it’s the longest day, Useo has just dropped this year’s Summer Booty album – and also this year I am on it! That’s not why I am talking about it, although I’d be lying if I wasn’t proud of my mashup taking Taylor Swift and ‘drums please!’ DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince’s Summertime and well, shaking it up. Or off.
Useo asked me to be on the Summer Booty album which is really kind, but nothing came to me until the night of the deadline. I was going through tracks for last week’s Crumplbangers challenge and left Summertime playing while I was listening to Shake It Off and went ‘hold on…this works!’. I am a massive Kool & The Gang fan (I even own a 7″ of Jungle Boogie, blame Pulp Fiction for that) and Summertime is basically Summer Madness so it was Kool and the Gang by proxy for me..
You can see the cover I made for it above next to the excellent artwork for Summer Booty by rappy.
But apart from my brazen plugging, there are some really good tracks on the 3 album Summer Booty set – I especially like these four as players (i.e. tracks that I earmark for podcast play, rather than keepers which are good but for my iTunes and might get promoted in future), think of it as A vs A*.
Oki’s The Boys Of The Sun (N.E.R.D. vs Don Henley) I love for making Don ‘I Hate Mashups’ Henley work where I failed. Another is AudioPusher’s Gabrielles Kiss (Dua Lipa vs Roy Davis Jr ) because I am an old-skool speed garage kid at heart and the Roy Davis Jr ‘Gabriel’ is one of my foundational tracks…the acapella sounds like a later re-record, but it doesn’t matter.
Mumdy takes Frankie Goes To Hollywood and makes it rock with Relax in the Echo – me? Liking a Linkin Park mashup? With MY reputation? Mumdy did two with the same Linkin Park instrumental – another with Phil Collins ‘In the Air Tonight’ Amaranth Air was also keeper.
And finally Chocomang’s Nobodies Bitter End (Wonder Girls vs Placebo) which is oddly downtempo versus the sunny vibes on all of the other tracks, the Placebo track talks about winter.. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest!
Other tracks that are keepers are Useo’s Sweet Setting Sun Dreams (Eurythmics vs Chemical Brothers) which bops along nicely as does Xam’s Sugar Rapture (Robin Schulz vs Nadia Ali) which I don’t know the sources at all but suspect this one might grow on me and become a ‘player’ track.
Eternal Khaos’s Mousse Like Jagger (Mousse T. vs Maroon Five) I like because I am indeed horny (I never said I was Robert Christgau – simple reasons for a simple A vs B, it’s not groundbreaking but it works). And Chocomang making Radiohead’s dourest track ‘Reckoner’ sound all uptempo which I peversely love in Reckoner Lucky Bone (Chic vs Radiohead vs Daft Punk). Again with the non-sunny music on a summer booty album, I like that bittersweetness 😉
Smashing Pumpkins is always welcome in DJ Petrushka’s Today Girl (Gwen Stefani vs Smashing Pumpkins) and Rudec’s Easy Porcelain (Moby & Nico Szabo vs Commodores) has some really nice sunny Sunday vibes with those Moby strings which seem to be popping up again everywhere? Why? Did the stems leak or something?
Sampling Banarama will always get my attention (shame it’s not Cruel Summer) with AtoZ’s Really Saying Something In School (The Donnas vs The Police vs Bananarama). and DRA’man – One Of These Crazy Nights (Seal vs The Eagles) surprised me because of the use of a lesser known Eagles track and it’s pretty much solid technically.
The Muse sampling track by Eternal Khaos‘s Madness Love (Lionel Richie & Diana Ross vs Muse) sounds like it should be on the new Assimilation Theory album., it would’ve fit in there perfectly and forcing sickly sweet Endless Love to have a synthwavy rock edge is a good call. I actually enjoyed listening to that track for once….
Heatwave is an obvious choice for a Summer album but sadly not an obvious choice for mashups – I mean Rod Temperton went on to basically write a lot of MJ’s best tracks but rarely does his work appear in mashup form which is a crime against disco?. So it was great to see DJ Spider’s The Boogie Night Business (Edit) (Heatwave vs Tiesto) – disco trance? Say it aint so! Works though.
Of course I didn’t like everything on Summer Booty, but with three albums to go at, there’s something probably for everyone. Apart from the people who REALLY hate summer. I think they’ll have to wait til Halloween….download it here.
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