Flying Mojito Bros released The Swamp Fox, an album featuring their remixes of recordings by late singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White, known as The Swamp Fox, was a native of Louisiana and wrote such noteworthy songs as “Polk Salad Annie,” “Undercover Agent for the Blues” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.” White died in 2018 at age 75. White’s son and official archivist, Jody White, contacted Flying Mojito Bros (London-based duo Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen) to collaborate with them on the remix album.
…”During the late 70’s and early 80’s, Tony Joe was blending country, swamp and disco into his own recipe of funky dance music,” Jody White explains. “With some help from the Flying Mojito Bros, these songs are about to see the light…
Category: disco
…40CD box set houses 319 tracks; the playing time is more than 28 hours. If features seven-inch single versions, 12-inch single versions, remixes, B-sides and non-album tracks.
Summer Time: The Singles Collection 1974-2010, coming from the late singer’s Driven by the Music catalogue imprint, is set to be a staggering tribute to Donna Summer’s decades-long presence as a dancefloor filler. Timed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her breakthrough hit “Love to Love You, Baby,” this 40CD set will highlight five decades’ worth of single sides she issued all over the world, from early Dutch single-only tracks to material from her tenures on Casablanca, Geffen, Mercury, Warner Bros., Atlantic and more. Amidst the familiar hits (“Love to Love…
Neo-disco artist Prins Thomas followed his two numerically titled 2022 albums with a full-length bearing his given name. Thomas Moen Hermansen is an apt title for a record which essentially sounds like the artist being himself and doing what he does best. Basically functioning as a one man band, he lays down steady rhythms with shuffling drums and chugging basslines, splashing them with sunny synth melodies. It’s usually pretty easygoing and carefree, but there is a touch of melancholy to these tracks.
The first one is called “Heartbreak,” and even though its brisk stroll doesn’t sound dramatic or devastated, it’s not bursting at the seams with joy either, and sounds like it could be music for a long walk while one is dealing with pain.
In 1982, London-based Sikh devotional singer Mohinder Kaur Bhamra recorded a true oddity. Accompanied by her son Kuljit on an early Roland synthesiser and drum machine, the pair laid down nine tracks of Punjabi folk vocals backed by hammering electronic percussion, disco basslines and fizzing synth melody.
Only 500 copies of the resulting album, Punjabi Disco, were pressed; it was released to confusion from a diaspora audience used to the bombast of bhangra. In the decades since, rare LPs have appeared on resale sites, but Kuljit’s recent rediscovery of the master tapes has now made the record widely available for the first time.
The blipping electronic toms and rattling shaker of opening number ‘Disco Wich Aa’ set…
Two naked, moustachioed beefcakes sit back to back, eyes averted, linked by wires, resistors, and switches, as if plugged into the same circuit board. Connection, sex, loneliness, and electricity all smashed together — has there ever been a better pictorial representation of Patrick Cowley‘s music? I’m referring here to the sleeve of Cowley’s not-new new album Hard Ware, the latest in a series of releases by California record label Dark Entries that has turned up all manner of wonders from the archive of the pioneering disco producer, who died in 1982 of AIDS.
Cowley lifers will know by now, more or less, what to expect from Hard Ware. Glistening synthesizers and squelchy basslines do battle over drum machines, while vocalists pop up here…
Recording for the Fantasy label, his singles regularly scaled the upper reaches of Billboard’s club chart, truly breaking through with the ecstatic Top 40 crossover hits “Dance (Disco Heat)” and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” both of which drove the 1978 album Step II to a gold certification.
Sylvester’s genre-defining disco album Step II arrives on CD for the first time ever, as a bonus-filled Deluxe Edition featuring Tonic Funk’s never-before-heard “Space Funk” Club Mix of “Dance (Disco Heat)”, plus Bright Light Bright Light’s fresh take on “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, and new liner notes from Joshua Gamson. Described by Pitchfork as “a formative record in the queer canon,” Step II took Sylvester’s from a Bay Area icon, to a national disco superstar whose…
…Bonus four track CD featuring a cover and three live tracks.
Say She She were praised by none other than Chic leader Nile Rodgers after the release of Silver, their second album. It’s impossible to imagine a greater form of validation for an accurately self-described “discodelic” vocal trio whose name is a play on the refrain from Chic’s indelible “Le Freak.” Singers and songwriters Nya Brown, Sabrina Cunningham, and Piya Malik keep riding the wave with their third album, on which they’re backed again by the flexible-as-ever instrumentalists of Orgone. The slick, supercharged “Disco Life” reaffirms their affinity for disco as a crucial subcultural movement while envisioning “a playing field where all are free.” The song uses that and other baseball…
After landing in the Top 30 in their native Australia as well as charting across Europe with their second album, Day/Night (2021), Parcels remain deeply indebted to the sounds of the ’70s on LOVED, an album guided by the theme of unity. What makes Parcels so irresistible here — at least if one is open to some wholehearted brotherly love — is that their particular touchstones seem to include funky disco in the celebratory tradition of Chic, certain civil rights-era classic soul, and the vestiges of harmony-driven West Coast hippie folk-rock, all tinged with modern indie and electro-pop. Not entirely party-hearty, a good half of the album succumbs to a yearning bittersweetness, although it’s relentlessly affectionate throughout, and LOVED kicks off with a dance-funk…
Rodney was the guy that played with The Spinners. He was one of the musicians that had made it out of Indianapolis. Rodney was a step ahead of us because of that. The group that started to rise above everyone was Rapture. They started to take over.
“When I look at my journey, and Rodney’s journey, I see two guys from the same town that took two different routes…. in one sense Rodney is every bit as successful as I am. Because he’s been able to make a living with music. He’s been able to play with people that he respects and he’s played with major artists everywhere. Most importantly, he’s been able to do what he loves.” – Kenny Edmonds
Recorded by Rob Bennett and Jim Duncan in 1977 at Mantra Recording Studio, Chicago IL.
In 1979, Record Player privately pressed and issued a solitary 45 on their Gem City Records imprint in Dayton, Ohio. Though they had recorded a host of other songs, and were on the verge of signing to a major label, their trajectory stalled and the band splintered by the early 1980s.
In the early 2000s, Record Player principle Charles Jackson surfaced with their unreleased songs. To date, only two Record Player songs have been reissued, as part of Now-Again’s long-running Soul Cal series. Now, the entirety of their oeuvre is presented here as Free Your Mind, and their story detailed in words by Bret Sjerven.
From Bret Sjerven’s liner notes: “(By 1984) the principal members of Record Player (had) mainly stepped away from music. Lamar remains…
On his second album Quit to Play Chess, the singer/songwriter and producer Cola Boyy takes a step away from the shimmering retro disco and soft rock sounds that made him a sensation and instead branches out into all sorts of directions, including R&B, hip hop, retro dance music, reggae, and funk. Sadly, it’s also his final album; he passed away on the same day he approved the final mastering. There’s no sense of sadness found in the music though; it’s a buoyantly joyful expression of Matthew Urango’s musical vison and philosophy of life that is meant to move feet and stir hearts. It succeeds on both fronts. Urango recorded the album in his hometown of Oxnard with the help of a batch of collaborators including co-producer Jared Solomon and MGMT’s…