Thursday Mornings

This is my song as of late. On repeat.

Tracklist:

Yesman • Elevator • Weedkiller • Straylight • More Of You • Sticks • Easy • No Other • Face Up • Frustratin

Bandcamp

Wilfy D - Midnight Shift (Soul Mass Transit System Remix)

From The EP: Time Is Now White Vol 3 (2021)

[2-Step, Speed Garage]

Listen/purchase: BEDWETTER by BULIMIC RAINBOWS

Burial.Vinyl

Today's compilation:

Now That's What I Call Music! 48 2001 Pop / Teen Pop / Adult Contemporary / House / R&B / UK Garage / Pop-Rock / Trance / Alternative Rock / Dance-Pop / Latin Pop

Alright, well, I know what *some* of you might be thinking here:

Hey, waitaseckin! You're tryna tell me that the 48th volume of Now came out in 2001? But my copy of Volume 6 that I hold near and dear to my heart came out that same year too! How the hell could they have released more than 40 volumes of this stuff within a single year?!

Well, you silly American, they didn't. I mean, don't you know that this whole super pervasive enterprise of repackaged contemporary hits didn't actually start in the States?? Now's original home is in the UK, and its first ever volume came out in 1983. And on top of that, while each of your American installments in the main series have only consisted of either one disc or one cassette, the UK's releases have been either double-discs, double-cassettes, or double-LPs!

So that's what we have here, folks. An early 2000s double-disc Now dispatch from the UK.

Now, I know that over the past week and change I've been really singing the praises of the UK music industry writ large when comparing it to America's, but the buck is going to have to stop right here, because despite this thing having a small, eclectic handful of flat-out y2k-era bangers on it, it's still, unfortunately, pretty freaking bad. The plurality of what's on this is pure pop music, and while the tunes that were also popular in the States, like Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird" and Britney's "Stronger" are the ones that undoubtedly go the hardest, the vast majority of the rest of them are just very flat. No flair or pizzazz in the production chops; just deeply uninspired, hollow, mass-produced dreck. I don't think I've ever heard a good solo Spice Girls single before, and that streak continues with both Emma Bunton's "What Took You So Long" and Melanie B's "Feels So Good," and even the often reliable Robbie Williams, whose singles usually satisfy with a level of charmingly catchy and classy glitz, sounds like lame Christian megachurch pop-rock here, with "Let Love Be Your Energy." Ugh!

But what always seems to make these UK versions of Now ultimately still worth a listen is the electronic music, which is something that the US versions didn't dabble in too much in the early years, besides a couple Fatboy Slim jams here and there. I got pretty deep into the nature of the UK music industry in a post last week, but to sum it up quickly here, the UK embraced electronic and dance music in the late 80s with the Second Summer of Love, which made acid house wildly popular, and ever since then the country has been far more willing to embrace many forms of electronic music, while the US simply hasn't.

So that's why there are a whole lot more dance tunes on the UK comps than the US ones, and even though they can be quite cheesy too, like Dario G's pop-trance defilement of The Cranberries' "Dreams" 😒, you're still bound to run into at least one very good song that Americans don't know anything about; and that song in this particular volume is a piece of house from Italy's Planet Funk called "Chase the Sun." As far as I can tell, Planet Funk have never charted in the US in any capacity before, but this debut single of theirs ended up proving immensely popular across the pond, netting itself a top-five spot on the UK singles chart in 2001. With a melody taken from an Ennio Morricone tune and vocals provided by Finland's Auli Kokko, this very sleek and well-layered gem really makes for a beautifully warm and nocturnal kinda vibe 😌.

But other than that, there's really not too much else here that Americans who had their radios locked onto their favorite commercial hit radio stations and their TVs tuned to MTV wouldn't know about. Usually when I sift through these UK versions of Now, I end up finding a lot more goodies that failed to make it Stateside, but nothing else on these two discs here really feels worth writing about. I still prefer the UK version of this series overall, of course, because the electronic music naturally makes it far more eclectic than the US version, but that eclecticism doesn't always translate into a better release; and such is the case here 😔.

Highlights:

CD1:

Nelly Furtado - "I'm Like a Bird" Shaggy feat. Ricardo "Rik Rok" Ducent - "It Wasn't Me" Modjo - "Chillin'" Britney Spears - "Stronger" Backstreet Boys - "Shape of My Heart"

CD2:

Feeder - "Buck Rogers" Papa Roach - "Last Resort" Planet Funk - "Chase the Sun" Safri Duo - "Played-A-Live (The Bongo Song)" Mýa - "Case of the Ex" Chanté Moore - "Straight Up" Joe - "Stutter"

Just dropped a preview for my remix of Hudson Mohawke and Nikki Nair's Set The Roof on my SoundCloud! DM if you want it!

(2003, Labsoul Records, LSR-056)

Burial’s Burial