Various Artists
Kitsuné Maison Compilation 3
Kitsuné
The line between rock and dance music has gotten very blurry in the last few decades and the third Maison compilation makes it clear that those hip, French folks at Kitsuné seem to be doing their part to destroy that line altogether. Kitsuné Maison 3 offers fourteen tracks (and a secret one) of dance music that simply rocks. Though the majority of the songs are straight-up electronica with nods to ’70s disco and a few head bangs to ’80s metal, a few tracks are very danceable music by traditional guitar-bass-keyboard-drum groups. The Lovely Feather’s lovely track “Frantic” sounds like the little cousin with A.D.D. of the Stroke’s “Last Night.” Meanwhile, Röyksopp and Kings of Convenience’s Erlend Øye and his new “live” band, The Whitest Boy Alive, bring us a track from their debut album Dreams called “Done With You” that that sounds like the stoic brother of “House of Jealous Lovers.”
Yet unlike a lot of rock out there and almost all dance music (including the previous Kitsuné compilations) this album is loaded with “ideas.” One track by Boyz Noize, titled simply “Feel Good (TV=Off)” uses a looped sample of the words “Television” and “Politician” to bookend the beginning and end of five minutes of some straight-up, feel-good acid house, while two other tracks make blatant allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Franz Kafka. Along with a few clever rhymes throughout the portions of the tracks with singing, Kitsuné churns out a disc full of some of the most rocking and intelligent dance music out there, while maintaining a safe distance from both mainstream rock and IDM.
Kitsune: http://www.kitsune.fr
