1. Pleasure
2. Freek
3. Turn Me Off
4. Somebody
5. Party Animal Stylus melting edit heat from Hud*** Mo*****, pressed on loud vinyl and housed in screen-printed sleeve! It's now been over 3 years since he dropped that dynamite buncha R&B and Hip Hop edits on the 'Ooops!' 12", which has since gone on to be (one of, if not his most) sought-after vinyl release. So this time out he's drawn for cherry picked vocal bombs from Janet Jackson, Jodeci, Aaliyah, Gucci Mane, Keri Hilsom and Lil Wayne, all pinched and tweaked to Glaswegian funk specifications. For us, the chromium-chords of his Janet Jackson 'Pleasure Principle' and that snapping, snakey and raved-out rebuild of Aailyah's 'Somebody' are the instant highlights, but everyone's going to have their own percival, it's just one of those records. If Royal Mail charged for added club weight on this, you'd all be f**ked. A BIG recommendation...www.boomkat.com
1. Octan
2. Thunder Bay
3. Cbat
4. All Your Love
5. Thank You
Hudson Mohawke's recent output-- a bonkers remix of Wiley's "Electric Boogaloo", a handful of decent edits on his Soundcloud-- has been enough to catch relatively high-profile ears. Not long ago, the Glasgow producer (real name: Ross Birchard) received a ridiculously glowing Twitter shout-out from hip-hop head-knocker Just Blaze, and Chris Brown jumped on an old HudMo track. Still, in a way it's surprising Mohawke has received any level of popularity beyond beat freaks and Warp roster-checkers. His 2009 debut LP, Butter, didn't exactly flow like the melted yellow stuff; it was an unfocused mix of future-R&B pastiche and jumbled funk experimentation.
Good thing for second chances. Mohawke's new Satin Panthers EP shows the kind of improvement that a couple of years in the lab will do for you. His music is still jumbled-sounding, but rather than being sneakily complicated, this record is obviously so; the fact it all works so well is the sneaky part. Mohawke packs in oodles of genre- and artist-specific tics: the hard-hitting repetition of Chicago juke, the sharp melodic tang of Bristol's "purple" scene, the sticky swarm of Los Angeles-era Flying Lotus, the light-cycle chaos of hip-hop producer Lex Luger, and the galloping rhythms of UK funky. Which might sound like the recipe for a total mess, except HudMo combines every ingredient expertly.
One complaint: The EP's 17-minute run time feels too brief. Luckily, Satin Panthers offers more than enough to tide listeners over until a potential follow-up album, whether the double-octave bass line on "Thunder Bay" or the building synth spirals on "Octan". The closing track, a burst of marching-band mania, is called "Thank You", but when all's said and done, there's a lot of gratitude to go around here...www.pitchfork.com
