Category Archives: Records

Great early 80’s album from Cameroonian Manu Dibango, who plays all solo saxophone and marimbas on the record. Known mostly outside of world music for Soul Makossa and “Mama-say, mama-sa, ma-ma-ko-ssa”, 1981’s Ambassador is full of awesome grooves and was recorded in Kingston, at Compass Point in Nassau, in New York, Paris and London. This […]

A collaboration between A.R. Kane and Colourbox, Pump up the Volume is a seminal dance song that makes inventive use of sampling and hip-hop rhythms back in 1987. The song was an effort by the bands to produce a hit dance track for America, and it succeeded there and worldwide, going to No. 1 in […]

Another album to pad the dance tracks, Keep on Movin’ is a classic that I needed to have. The drum machine rhythms and soulful vocals date it, but it reached #1 on the R&B charts in the U.S. and it is still a great track. Soul II Soul was founded by Jazzie B, who ran […]

This is the Earth, Wind & Fire I had been looking for since I started buying records. I wasn’t able to find it in any record stores, for some reason, so I opted to just buy it on Discogs for a low price. Starting with Shining Star and the title track on side one, 1975’s […]

Basement Jaxx’s 1999 debut Remedy spawned four singles, Rendez-Vu, Red Alert, Jump N’ Shout and Bingo Bango, all classic tracks that still sound great. The album was released at a time when The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim were the faces of electronic music, but Basement Jaxx were seen as a savior of dance music […]

The label says it all, its in E Minor and the tempo is 126 BPM. The English production trio of Stock Aitken Waterman ran off hit after hit by exploiting Hi-NRG club music and bringing it to artists like Bananarama and writing songs for Rick Astley and Kylie Minogue. SAW followed up their huge hit […]

I found this in one of the underneath bins at Rasputin, and for $0.50 I couldn’t pass it up. It is actually a bootleg, which explains its low price, but otherwise its a great copy of a great album by the most popular Brazilian group in the U.S. Fool on the Hill is another perfectly […]

This was one of the first fusion albums I listened to, drawn to the accolades given to the keyboard work of Chick Corea and the guitar of Al Di Meola, and I didn’t really like it. I remember meeting much older progressive rock fans who talked about this record, but I wasn’t digging it. It […]

I’ve never heard of Native Son, but they were a Japanese jazz fusion band that were active in the early 80’s. I thought the artwork was cool on this album, and I looked at the instruments and musician credits: Fender Rhodes? Saxophones? Electric bass and cuica? It looked good, and was a pleasant surprise among […]

Now fully in funk territory, Cameo’s 1980 album Feel Me was their sixth album, and all six were made within a four year span. Granted, they started to run out of ideas toward the end of their first run, but Feel Me has classics like Keep It Hot and other choice cuts like the title […]