Water Music Records
This is a record for the chronically impatient lounge archeologist, as it pays homage to the roots of a sound that has been shaking our collective butts for quite some time. "Swinging Bachelor Pad Music" is a 16-track collection that lands as lightly as a cat, but has the potential to serve as a very effective boredom-repellent in any party.
It kicks off somehow shyly with "Anamaria (Tito Valdez Mix)", a Latin-soaked number by the Key Tronics Ensemble, only to pick up steam a few minutes later on the deranged "Ass Enchillada", by Hammond Express. The latter is an organ-driven track that would only leave someone with dried out cement in their veins untouched.
But if classics are your thing, you should definitely check out the psychedelic reworking of "The Odd Couple", as delivered by Capiozzo & Mecco in a so-called party version. Challenger provides a dramatic take on "Be Bop a Lula" that pulverizes the original into chalky powder. It's the kind of extreme treatment that prevents history from repeating itself, because all you can do is mix up the powder and pour it into a completely new mould.
On the other hand, this record allows lounge history to drag itself out of the swamp in tiny little chapters that may or may not wear make-up to salute the new audiences. In less than three minutes, Black Mighty Wax's "Dona Flor" manages to make all detractors, always ready to eschew lounge music as purely ornamental, sink like heavy stones.
Sure many of the artists featured here make meager livings selling records, but the effort put into making this music for us, the common mortals, to dance to, is priceless. If played in cemeteries, "Mad Atari", as cut by DJ Rodriguez, could easily raise the dead, or at least come close to awakening the spirits of the numb.
Speaking of spirits, no lounge record would be complete without a deliberate liquor reference, and this "Swinging Bachelor Pad Music" has at least two. Montefiori Cocktail's "Tequila Bum Bum", a fetishist sonic water color where downtempo rubs shoulders with jazz, as the party goes on with the serving of "Whisky a Go-Go" by the aforementioned duo Capiozzo & Mecco.
With the conclusion of the record within spitting distance, there come the mind-consuming Tommy Bass's "Bow Wow", and the second resurfacing of "The Odd Couple", now in a vocal version. This is the kind of stuff that makes your foot keep moving way after the party is over and you are profoundly asleep.
http://www.properlychilled.com/music/release/profile.php?view=530
