Pitchfork
69
It's often said that dance music has a short shelf life—that once-novel sounds and techniques are eventually flattened by the technological steamroller that is Moore's Law. That's not necessarily true, though. If the retro fixations of the current century have told us anything—from electroclash's fascination with the early '80s to the recent revival of grime's bleepy fundamentals—it's that dance music's period-specific patinas are a big part of its enduring charm.
A new anthology of the duo Mood II Swing is, if anything, overdue. Their productions in the '90s helped establish a style of house music—moody, colorful, and rhythmically inventive—that has had a profound impact on several successive generations of club producers. Their unique sense of swing helped feed the slinky syncopations of UK garage around the turn of the millennium; more recently, the hypnotic and soulful aspects of their sound have influenced revivalist house music from the underground all the way to the top of the charts, from tunes like Jack J's "Thirstin'" to Duke Dumont's "Need U (100%)." The bulk of the songs collected here date from between 1992 and 1997, but the uninitiated listener hearing them for the first time might well mistake many of them for brand-new productions. Many sound uncannily current; the best sound timeless.
That Mood II Swing (consisting of Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone) established such an immediately recognizable style is all the more impressive for the fact that most of the time they were remixing other artists. Only 14 of the 33 songs here are originals; the rest are remixes for a diverse lot of pop and R&B acts whose names have mostly faded from view, like Kim English, Loni Clark, and Ultra Naté, whose career peak, 1997's "Free," was co-written with and produced by Mood II Swing. No matter who the credited performer is, though, a number of hallmarks remain constant throughout. The most obvious is the group's infectious and inimitable sense of the groove. Around steady kicks and hi-hats, regular as fence posts, snake vine-like figures dipping and bobbing in the breeze—shakers and congas, hiccupping accidentals and sidewinding basslines that turn even the most linear rhythms into controlled explosions of kinetic energy.
On a song like Doubleplusgood's "Conga Té (Mood II Swing 12" Mix)," you can hear the influence of hip-hop, particularly Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad: Every inch of the track is stuffed with elements until it all ignites like a sky full of fireworks. A typical Mood II Swing track is charged with so much friction, you expect sparks to fly, and that's particularly true when they indulge their fondness for busted and broken sounds. You can hear that in the distortion of BT's "Remember (Mood II Swing Remix)," in which the kick drum rattles like a shredded speaker cone, and the nervy squelch of the heavily filtered "Slippery Track," which rivals Matthew Herbert's most aggressively funky work of the period.
The compilation is split more or less evenly between vocal tracks and instrumentals or dub versions, and in the case of Eric Gadd's "The Right Way," which is presented in both versions, you can hear how differently the duo approached those two contexts. The vocal mix leaves the singer's whispery falsetto unadulterated, and the results sound a lot like early '90s R&B with a piano-house underpinning. (The vocalists they worked with tend to be soulful belters; your appreciation for the vocal side of their catalog will depend largely upon your fondness for that emphatic, melismatic style.) On the dub, though, Mood II Swing mute everything the singer does save for a plaintive looped cry. It's on these dub mixes and instrumental cuts where Mood II Swing's talents really shine: Just check "Do It Your Way," which takes a "Billie Jean"-like bassline and kits it out in flashing ride cymbals, slapback delay, and a liquid tone that sounds like a melancholy snippet of whale song. In these moments they're sultans of swirl, masters of the hypnotic groove, and as nuanced as anyone in dance music, then or now.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016