There are two lyrics spread through this album that I think sum up the sound perfectly. “I just wanna hear a good beat”, from the track Good Beat, and “It’s a universal sign, everyone can do it, you can change people’s minds if you choose to use it” about the power of a smile from the track Smile On.
For
some reason I’d always thought that Deee-Lite were European, but although the
singer Lady Miss Kier (Kieren Magenta Kirby) is from the USA and the band was
New York based, fellow band members DJ Towa Towa (Towa Tei) and Supa DJ Dmitry
(Dmitry Brill) are Korean-Japanese and Eastern European (former USSR)
respectively.
It’s
all predictably upbeat house music, full of keyboard-mashing riffs e.g. Try Me
On, I’m Very You and What Is Love, a laid-back funky track with spoken word
vocals (not the Haddaway one). There’s a reason Groove Is In The Heart is
the most enduring track from this album, it’s the most complex in terms of
tempo changes and the variety of samples dropped in, that unmistakeable swanee
whistle in the chorus, for example.
I
was going to say that it makes a nice palate-cleanser from all the hip-hop, but
really it employs the same techniques – Towa and Dmitry cutting and pasting
together breakbeats in the same manner as Coldcut, the difference being that
Kier sings rather than raps. And, indeed, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest makes
an appearance on Groove (Deee-Lite sharing the same kind of flower-power
iconography as the Native Tongues collective).
As
with prior dance music offerings, sometimes the songs are quite simple and
forgettable as tracks to merely listen to, but that’s not really what they’re
for, they’re meant for clubbing – again this is probably why Groove is the most
interesting track on here because it works both as a dance anthem and as a tune
you can listen to for its own sake.
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