It’s worth noting (and a real shame) that distribution problems have meant this record flew undetected past the radar last year. It’s probably my number 1 album of 2004. So it’s only an undiscovered classic cos it never had a decent chance of being discovered. Rumour has it most of them are still stuck in a factory somewhere.

Like alot of 2004 records, The Way We Go is a sort of “super-pop”, existing in that space somewhere between disco-punk, electroclash, and rock music, which seems to drip with sex and glamour. It’s perhaps comparable to Devin Dazzle and the Neon Fever.It’s also the sort of record that makes you invent genre names. For instance, I like to call “Mes Amis” acid-pop. And “Strings Of Silvercity” is like an electroclash sea shanty. The vocals throughout are absolutely bubblegum, seldom big but always clever.

The Way We Go is hyper-sophisticated but at the same time kooky, it’s super-sexy and fashionable but also vulnerable and wistful. In an alternate universe the entire world dances to this music! In this sense there’s a real Wizard of Oz feel to the whole thing, was “Silvercity” in Wizard of Oz? If so that makes alot of sense! Anyway, what’s more important is that as far as verse/chorus song based music goes (and in this case very very far, for once) this is one of the freshest, sexiest, coolest and downright best albums I think I’ve ever heard. If you have ever used the phrase dream-pop………………well then you know to go and buy this!

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The most striking thing about “The Show” is how it reinforces, for me, an idea which I think I gleaned from Morley somewhere or other. There’s a section in “Words and Music” where he is very verbose about Dr Dre’s productions and analyses them with some depth, and then concludes by saying “in other words, he is a cool motherfucker”. Dre’s beats, like ANY really tightly executed electronic beats, just reek of arrogance. There is something utterly uncompromising and unfair about those moments when production seems rock hard and untouchable. “Rubicon” has it, “Still Dre” has it, Vitalic has it, “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” had it but it seems to have faded with time. “In Da Club” converted it into medicinal strength crack and sold millions without losing a scrap of its original dignity. And “The Show” has this swagger too, without a doubt.

Whether the girls themselves are aware of just what a beat they’ve been given is unclear, though the important thing is that they appear to know exactly what is going on. “The Show” is the suffocating force of consumer driven pop music at its ruthless best, it’s the girl pop “In Da Club”, a behemoth of a production which will soon cease to depend on any opinion or anything beyond its own swaggering existence. This record is the most instantaneous pop or dance moment of 2004, the charts are its bitch.

The great tragedy about Carnival by Archigram, is that it was released in a year when hacks were more concerned with talking about dance music’s demise than listening to records or going out. It’s understandable, nightclubs can get pretty noisy, I once had a beer spilt on me, disgusting. I firmly believe that if 2002 was 1997 Carnival by Archigram would not only be considered a great record, it would be considered one of the greatest.

Carnival is a record for people, you don’t need to like dance music to get it, though if you don’t a few listens may be needed with your stereo turned up to 11. It’s a record which imitates the house mix in its own series of waves and undulations, from the gently rippling bassline to those tingling filters in the background which seem to make the track one endless musical climax. And the final straw is one gigantic trumpet stab doused all over the track, which can only prompt the listener to pump their fists, or jump in the air, or even play air guitar.

So it builds, and it falls, and it builds, and it endlessly builds and falls, eventually falling back into the trumpet riff again. It’s an intensely subtle record, it’s also one of the biggest “tunes” I know. How it pulls off the two is something of a miracle, I’m unsure any record since DJ Rolando’s epic Jaguar has walked this line with such verve. It’s this nonchalant feat which means Carnival makes the fan a critic and the critic a fan, with both trying to figure out why they’re dancing.

Magic.

Feeling quite stultified lately, possibly by paid writing having ruined my confidence, so maybe I need to get back on my feet where it all started. Or maybe this will make me worse, either way the real point of this post is to say congratulations to all involved in the FT relaunch, if I could make a living out of writing online I would. Tom once wrote his reasons for not writing for pay, I tried to find that piece and failed. But certainly paid writing simply feels like a way to listen to records and get paid for me, rather than any form of communication or art. If people are going to pay me to write then that’s great, but the chances of anything I do meaning anything to me are slim, as far as I can see.

The reality is I have to deal with editors and sub-editors and editors assistants who have no idea why someone wouldn’t like rock music. In these parts it’s easy to forget that some people automatically assume the only way you can’t love indie is by not hearing it due to the corrupt radio filling our ears with dop and pance and all the rest of the “superficial” stuff. When is it ok to have an axe to grind? If I don’t like a rock record I’m given to review, and tear it apart accordingly, the band get a bad review in a magazine with 20, 000 circulation. What about when someone doesn’t like a dance record? Someone ALREADY doesn’t fucking like a dance record, any bloody dance record.

Dance records don’t even reach the point of being torn apart by some wanker, they’re already not popular enough with the writers to get reviewed in the first place. The point being, my prejudices or axes to grind have some potentially productive end result. But it’s no life really, hacking away against an establishment which can never understand the point of the hacking in the first place. You either conform and take small satisfaction from reviewing records you love, or you give up. Either way one thing is clear, writing for money requires you to accept the utter dominance of rock music in every single thing you do. And it’s enough to fuel the fire even more. There’s something greatly ironic in the fact that those who champion silly and goofy and happy music end up the most embittered by trying to do so, and those championing the cult of the serious and the miserable are permanently self satisfied.

The beat goes on.

Either way I’ve been mostly listening to my favourites from last year, aswell as compilations from last year I’ve just managed to pick up this year. Part of my problem might be actually remembering the names of the songs. I listened to Pete Tong’s show on Tuesday. I usually skip to songs where I know the producer, but somehow I heard Linus Loves and instantly recognised it as the song which was the highlight of last Saturday.

It’s very 80s for starters, not electro though. It’s a two part record, the first is an insanely catchy 80s synth loop. I haven’t heard a loop as beautiful since last November or October. The second part is a sparkly piano bridge which only exists to tease you into going crazy when the first loop comes back. Most of the big tunes so far this year have been latin style, and it’s all well and good but it’s been done ten thousand times. It’s becoming increasingly clear that electro and the french house mafia are far and away the best resources for house music to draw on. Having said that there are a whole glut of homogenised “lets remove the camp” electro house records this year, which are a waste of time. The Terrace is the best house record of 2003 so far, by a long long way.

I never doubt my doubts will be dispelled at some point, but forget how that feels almost daily.

The eternal trouble with this kind of track is that, while it’s easy to know the idea is about as original as showering in water, it’s still impossible not to be taken in by it. I have no doubt that this equation is the reason house music will never “die”, and the reason talk of a crisis was always slightly loopy. As long as there are camp voices to sample, throwaway cliches to use as the sucker punch for giant childrens tv fx loops, and Miami Music Conferences to tell us what to like, then everything is cool.

But the truth is the Audio Bullys are a dance act, and menace seldom co-exists with such a groove. The very fact that We Don’t Care has vocals makes it less menacing by default than a decent percentage of dance music, and more cartoon in itself. I don’t know how other people are recieving the Audio Bullys. I’ve yet to see any violence erupt at my discotheque. This doesn’t surprise me.

What I do know is that We Don’t Care is generally recieved with the same kind of euphoria as most other house records which chart at 14 are in packed clubs. The chorus is anthemic, there’s no doubting that, it’s the kind everyone begins to scream along to, safe in the knowledge that the sound system removes any need for singing ability. It’s a moment of testimony if anything. Ecstacy, you see, is something of a secret (not secret) little club. I’ve often ran into someone, in some social situation far removed from the psychoville that is the dancefloor, and had to simply say “good night on Saturday eh?” with a wink or smile.

The important thing is, these people know. And I know what they’ve been up to too.

When I go to College, things are different. I generally don’t even bother with Mondays, if you’ve got no sleep Saturday and drank much too much your brain has that smoking battlefield effect going on. When I do make it in, I try to spend as little time there as possible. Social events my class and friends organise seem to float by me. I have no interest, and that’s all there is to it. I go to seminars and say nothing, or say too much, one of two extremes. I’d imagine I come across as something of a dick to all but a few people. And as obvious as it may seem that’s where that We Don’t Care chorus grabs my attention. It’s 3, or 4, or 5 and the DJ plays it and as the process of losing myself continues I think of it as a nice piece of rhythmic reason for my lack of enthusiasm for all things 2nd year Journalism. And maybe it’s the same for everyone else who feels as though they have a secret life, for every guy lying to his girlfriend or parents or simply realising they can’t really “get it”.

After all secrets don’t have to be dark. There are things I’ve never told you, I go out late at night, and if I was to tell you, you’d see my different side. This one’s for my parents eh?

When I was younger and danced less I think at this point in my life if I was keen on finding a song for a specific feeling (I’m not) I’d have listened to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris doing “We’ll Sweep Out The Ashes In The Morning”. But I’m older, I care less, and I certainly dance more. Parsons and Harris did a bit of a confessional;”We know it’s wrong to let this fire burn between us, we’ve got to stop this wild desire in me and in you”. But this lyric sounds tired itself, that’s the point I guess, it’s the ashes of an already doomed relationship which refuses to just go out.

Danger! High Voltage! is also a song about seeing someone you shouldn’t, but the difference is the Electric 6 are revelling in it. It’s the sound of two people who are downright mystified by the connection between them but can’t stop announcing it either. “Don’t you want to know why we keep startin’ fires?” You bet I do! “It’s my desire! It’s my desire!” Hey! that could be it! And all the while the sparks are flying, and it really is dangerous because there’s no Parsons style guilt here. Neither person cares and ultimately something is going to fucking explode and somebody is going to end up hurt. The Electric 6 and I guess myself say “who cares”.

It’s strange to hear an acid house track which is so quietly groovy and doesn’t go off in your face at some stage. Instead it’s just skipping hopping playground house from start to finish with a late entry for lyric of the year; “I’ve got acid, in my brain. I don’t need, no cocaine, I need you, aaaaaaaaaaah acid love, aaaaaaaaaaah acid love”. In the unlikely event of Acid Love becoming a single, lets hope the boys do a Happy Mondays style video with schoolchildren.

“A time has come to make a decision, are we in this thing alone? Or are we in it……together!” It’s the kind of spoken voice sample that you might associate with some massive rave anthem. But the strained and looped response, “together”, is far from convincing. There comes a time in a nightclub or on a dancefloor when the drugs begin to wear off, when the direct link between brain and music begins to split, and severe concentration is required to maintain the feeling. Together is a record for this time of night. It’s no surprise for a Bangalter and Falcon record to be extremely stripped down, but this just invites the listener to think even harder. The opening question seems to resonate through the whole track, and it never gets a satisfactory answer.

Bangalter and Falcon have been accused of mocking the listener with records like these, and maybe they are. The sampled voice at the beginning is surely aping the style of Coldcut’s Journeys by DJ or one of the mid 90s Warp compilations. But the real mockery is in that nonstop loop, “together, together, together, together”, all the way through the song. It feels like a smack in the face to rave culture, not only are we not in this together, but the very question is a crazy one. Did you really believe they were asking it? Did you actually feel that?

I end up stuck on these kind of questions any morning after I’ve been out. Most people who’ll ever dance to Together will too. I guess when you blur the line between dreams and reality chemically, it doesn’t magically reappear.

It’s changing my life, more than one record or album ever could. And it’s shocking just how much emotion is being rammed into these songs. French house artists have always liked to mess with the standard repetition styles of dance music, but now it’s become a vocal thing too. The main ‘trick’ in house music has always been repetition to make certain sounds and samples resonate in the brain, but now more than ever this is being done to make certain lyrics resonate in the brain.

In this case it’s ‘just put your hand in mine’ which is repeated. It’s a vocal which begs the listener to love the record, to believe in it. Bangalter and Falcon’s forthcoming ‘So Much Love To Give’ single is the same. One lyric, one message, one riff, if you have no faith in repetition as a method for creating fantastic music, then this song is a wild eyed evangelical preacher. And the only other message is positivity.

I have issues with listening to techno every week on ecstacy because I am a human being! Make me feel human! Let me sing ‘just put your hand in mine’ and make the experience more fake in its total euphoria, but more real because love is. And because ‘just put your hand in mine’ is a real expression of it which everyone has said or wanted to say in some way.

And if writing this article is the closest I can get to becoming the man who preaches through Fatboy Slim’s ‘Song For Shelter’ then so be it ‘Stomp your feet, clap your hands and say sweet Lord speak to me!’

In the end the main reason I quit my job is because I despise working. Despise is too flowery a word even, to be honest I’d prefer ‘hate’. I hated working in a petrol station. I hated two of the managers, I hated when the customers asked me if sweets we sold tasted nice. I mean how the hell was I meant to know? I hated the way the shop opened at 7 in the morning and closed at midnight, ensuring if you got unlucky your whole life for one week would consist of dreading work, and working.

Or the guys who asked why our petrol costs 79.865 cents instead of 79.877, or the people who insisted on telling me what price something which wouldn’t scan was, despite the fact I knew the price all too well from having bashed in the 14 digit barcode ten times per day to ensure it actually went through. In time I even grew to hate everyday words and phrases which took on an altogether more hateable new context, ‘pump’, ‘unleaded’, ‘Ronan could youÖ’ etc.

The theory that everyone hates their job was thrown in my direction a few times and it must be true, however it was scant consolation. Not everyone is as good at hating their job as I was. I managed to ruin days off for myself by thinking about when I’d next end up in work. I’d come home at 1 in the morning and eat food from whatever greasehole happened to be open and sit by the TV staring vacantly like one of the characters in the crap films that always seemed to be on. And even while I knew this was all melodramatic, it didn’t change the fact that I had and still have a burning hatred for that fucking Service Station. I am totally lazy, and my imagination is a pretty potent hate generator. A few years ago I felt similarly about school. I’m not too keen on college either.

So when charged with ‘you don’t like anything except your music and going out’ by a relative, I had to plead guilty really. It hasn’t always been like this, I used to at least pretend to care about other things. I don’t know if it’s laziness that has made me love music even more, or if my love for music has just made me lazy. Either way, there’s no escaping it now, I have no interest in anything else. I guess it’s a pretty surly, adolescent and even simplistic hatred. I’ve sold my soul really, and reached a point in my life where I spend my weekdays in an imaginary waiting room. And the events which occur are just distractions, the equivalent of the shit magazines flung around to keep people occupied. The week is just a drone, a dull and never ending prog track. And then finally, eventually, just when you can’t take anymore; Saturday explodes back into your life.

‘Fun’ is a word used to describe countless things the childish punk in me hated for years, so I don’t want to use it to describe my Saturday nights. And to be honest, it wouldn’t quite fit. Of course I have fun, but it’s an intense experience, the music I love is my whole life. I’ve heard so many mind-blowing, head fucking classics, but none of them seemed to capture my feeling that they, the songs are all I have. Songs like ‘Take Me With You’ by Cosmos, lots of songs by the Chemical Brothers or Orbital, stomping house journeys like ‘Smoke Machine’ by X-Press 2, all these and about a thousand more have had something to do with the highest points of the best nights, but none of them have touched on the dull days quite enough. I guess doing the two at the same time isn’t easy.

Nothing had managed it really, until recently. It seems seeing Underworld live was the key to it all. I should have been prepared. Afterall I was driving to work a few weeks before and “Two Months Off” briefly whisked me away, far away from the grim reality of things I can’t stand. Underworld are the sound of hating your job and a lot of your life, of the gritty and constant struggle to get through the monotony and find a passion, ‘there is a sound on the other side of this wall, a bird is singing on the other side of this glass’. Out of the context of Underworld’s locomotive, euphoric productions, the lyrics can seem pretty stark and grim. Inside it, they’re flashing beacons of the outside world, quickfire glimpses of irrelevant things, the half thoughts and half fears that shoot through your brain while you drag yourself into the sound of an evening.

Underworld’s music shows a total understanding of just how vital it really is, of the fact that the moment it’s played in is the crucially important one and everything beyond that moment is an irrelevance. “Born Slippy” live is modern soul, the sound of work and play and death and love and everything else that makes life the lottery that it is, with the toughest, leanest, most punching beat straight out of dark streets in London or subways in New York. And just as you mentally look at the pavements that famous synth stab floods back in, and you think that even if this is the only reason you have to put up with weeks which are 90 percent boredom and frustration, it’s still enough.

And it’s clear to me now that this music represents a certain attitude to life, total euphoria surrounded by a darkness which is totally necessary and unavoidable. And behind all the washy synths and the dark relentless pounding of it all is one vivid manifesto, give everything you have to everything you love, and nothing to anything else Hear it in Rez/Cowgirl’s spiraling, deep tones; ‘I don’t dream. Ice Cream, I scream so much you know what I mean this electric stream, and my tears in league with the wires and energy, and my machine, this is my beautiful dream, I’m hurting noone, hurting noone, hurting noone, hurting noone, I wanna give you everything, I wanna give you energy, I want to give a good thing, I want to give you everything. Everything, everything, everything, everything, everything’

I don’t dream. Who needs dreams or nightmares with a reality like this.

I first heard “Sunglasses at Night” by Tiga and Zyntherius in a ridiculously packed club. Despite the lighting which bordered on offensive and the sheer wall of sound in front of me, I liked it. It’s a brooding, nervy track, dominated by a relentless pulsing bassline, the type that might scare small children. Of course, no-one could dance to it. I’d say “none of us”, but we’re not talking about the “rave family” here. This isn’t House music, and it doesn’t belong to you or your brothers.

In fact, looking around the dancefloor, there were people making sharp pronounced movements, and others swaying slowly like idiots. I sat down. I’d already conceded that dancing to a Dave Clarke techno set while not under the influence of drugs was near impossible, and now the softer moments were proving troublesome too.

But then “Sunglasses at Night”, like most of the 2CD Futurism album it appears on, is electronic music with a distinct rock ethic. And if you want to divide a dancefloor, or if you want to make your audience compete with each other, hell; if you want to turn a dance venue into an indie club you could do a lot worse than play a Felix Da Housecat track. I’ve seen rooms of people dancing awkwardly to “Last Nite” by The Strokes. I say awkwardly because how can there ever be a universal physical connection to Rock music, apart from singing of course? Futurism, like lots of modern rock, is layered and frenetic. It doesn’t rely on repetition. It’s the bad dancer’s nightmare, and the show-off’s chance to shine. If The Strokes ever “do a Kid A”, they’ll end up making an electro album.

With vocals from the likes of Peaches and the ubiquitous Miss Kittin, one gets the impression that some of the artists here are aiming for a robotic drone all of their own – glamourous and sexy, and at the same time it’s wonderfully empty. This isn’t an uplifting album, rather a soundtrack to some trashy riches to rags movie. If you don’t believe me, skip to Royksopp’s tremendous reworking of Felix Da Housecat’s “What Does It Feel Like”.

The artists featured on the album specialize in taking the darker elements of today’s techno, fusing them with elements of pop and rock, then applying the mascara. There are few climaxes, few peaks or troughs, on Futurism. Instead, it’s a frenetic and incessant buzz, and in this sense it’s every bit as immersive as a techno set. But, inevitably, it’s not without a few forgettable points. “I Don’t Care” by Dexter is a dull affair, which does nothing other than bridge the gap between “Sunglasses at Night” and the the manically fantastic “La La Land” by Green Velvet. Similarly “Superbike” by Fat Truckers is out of place and out of date, a truly dreadful track which sounds like a bad blunder by a Norman Cook imitator.

But more often than not Futurism is a fine collection. “Grab My Shaft” by Louie Austen featuring Peaches is a super track, a sexy air to ground House missile with lyrics which are not to be shown to small children or OAPs. Another highlight is the Martini Brothers remix of Tok Tok Vs Soffy O’s “Missy Queen’s Gonna Die. The intro comes on like “Blue Monday” before exploding in your face, to become the slickest rock song you’ll hear this year. Miss Kittin supplies the murderous vocal for Golden Boy on “Rippin Kittin”, a twisted pop trainwreck of a song. FC Kahuna’s “Glitterball” is a rare uptempo moment, with a bassline recalling “Surrender” era Chemical Brothers. It’s nothing phenomenally new, but it whets the appetite for their forthcoming debut. The oddest inclusion is perhaps the Kitten and the Hacker remix of Kernkraft 400’s crossover smash “Zombie Nation”. Every drop is squeezed out of the central riff of the original, and then the whole thing is stripped down until it’s just right for Miss Kittin – her again – to drawl over. Her ubiquity here almost makes her whole schtick believable. Almost.

So sure this may be an aloof album lyrically and musically, but then if I can dream about guns in Compton, I don’t see why cocaine in New York or champagne in Geneva is so wrong. Because this is rock and roll. This has all the sleaze, arrogance, and plain smut of all the worst rock excesses. If you come to Futurism looking for the future, you may be disappointed: this is right here and this is right now.