Red Snapper
It’s All Good
Keep Diggin’/!K7
Usually, compilations can only be but so good. No matter how hard they try, they just can’t beat the artistic vision of a good album of original material. So, there are very few occasions when a compilation can blow one away. However, you will have to pick yourself up off the floor several times while listening to It’s All Good.
Recently disbanded British trio, Red Snapper, has definitely left behind one hell of an epitaph for electronic fans to ruminate over. Ayers, Thair, and Friend have carefully hand-picked some of the most eye-popping, innovative music to make this compilation the best I’ve personally heard since Gilles Peterson’s Incredible Sound disc a couple years back.
It’s All Good starts with His Name is Alive’s “Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth,” which is a mournful, seductive mish-mash of abstracted beats and R&B crooning. It leaves you somewhere in the nebula of gnashing teeth and redemptive sex. A true powerhouse of a song. They follow that earth-shaker with the mutilated beat of Prefuse 73’s “Nuno” (which will remind you of Anti-Pop and Dark Leaf). There’s the swirling beat of Susumu Yakota’s “King Dragonfly,” the Akufen-Meets-Jazzanova-esque “Take Control” by Riton, and the spicy Latin-tinged scorcher of Spacer’s “Houston.” The trio offers two songs: the beautifully weeping “Belladonna” and the menacing house cut, “Ultraviolet.” And one would really be missing out if they didn’t catch IG Culture’s hyper broken-beat Afro-funk remix of Nahawa Doumbia’s “Fatien.”
In all honesty, Red Snapper has pulled off a unique and extraordinary compilation that will have people talking and listening. Too bad the group is no longer around to profit from it.
Keep Diggin’: http://www.keepdigginrec.com • !K7: http://www.k7.com
