by JAY WATTS III

Large, saccharine doses of funky house tend to give me cavities, and I’ve never been one for potato chips, so I’ve never felt it necessary to delve into the music of Basement Jaxx, but the latest leaked single from their upcoming album Crazy Itch Radio has my curiosity piqued, despite, or perhaps because of, its goofy enthusiasm. Philadelphia’s Call Me Mickey has a couple of mixes of “Hush Boy” available at http://callmemickey.blogspot.com/2006/07/basement-jaxx-hush-boy-remixes.html.

The one thing missing from contemporary music is, as many old-timers would agree, soul. Sure, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings stop by every now and then, but as the old-timers have faded from memory, or even worse, taken to the old-timers circuit to peddle a soft-edged version of their hits from yesteryear for the weary ears of the Big Chill generation, one is left yearning for those salad days of yore. Larry Grogan of Funky16Corners blog (http://funky16corners.wordpress.com/) shows us just what we’re missing by posting the seventh volume of mixes of rare soul and funk from his collection of 45s, which should be on repeat if you find yourself having to take a roadtrip with a parent at any point before the end of this summer. Standouts include Bill Moss’s “Sock It to ’Em, Soul Brother,” and Lonnie Brooks’s “Let It All Hang Out,” a reminder of an era when that slender, silver rod (often maligned and seldom understood) was the yeast in your dough, leavening even the most plodding or shuffling track.

Superette/Supe-r-aitte (http://supe-r-aitte.blogspot.com/) is a French video-blog, chock full of 24-FPS broadcasts from Hipster Hell, providing the usual suspects of electro-house and neu-rock that have been crowding your favourite lifestyle magazines of late. New Phoenix, Peaches and Gossip jams are swell as hell, and my one complaint about the endeavour (besides the inclusion of MSTRKRFT’s Transformers-influenced yawner for “Work On You”) is the wide array of formats the videos are posted in. Standardize! Standardize!

I’VE GOT MY STANDARDS… goldkicks@gmail.com

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