In January 1987, Smash Hits tried to address the unexpected rise of house music by printing the lyrics to Steve “Silk” Hurley’s chart-topping Jack Your Body. In an attempt to circumvent the fact that the lyrics to Jack Your Body consisted entirely of the words “jack your body” repeated ad infinitum, the page was padded out with parenthetical descriptions of how the record sounded: “(Rather a long bit where it goes bing bong diddle a lot, then sort of dum-de-dum).” If the 21st century equivalent of the song words in Smash Hits is the YouTube lyric video – a phenomenon kickstarted by a cheap placeholder clip for Cee Lo Green’s 2010 hit Fuck You, and now warrants its own category at the MTV video music awards – then its Jack Your Body moment may have come with the release of DJ Koze’s Pick Up, a single that preceded this fifth solo album, Knock Knock. It was promoted with a video featuring nothing more than white words on a black background, offering not just its three lines of lyrics but a wry running commentary on the track: “vocal sample … beat kicks in … disco sample loop x6 … brain realises song consists only of these few elements … deep feeling of happiness” etc.
A video simultaneously revealing and celebrating the simplicity of its construction isn’t the only eccentric thing about Pick Up. It’s a fantastic single – the melancholy of the vocal snagging against the propulsive euphoria of the music in time-honoured style. But it’s based around precisely the same vocal sample – from Gladys Knight and the Pips’ 1972 ballad Neither of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye) – found on Midland’s inescapable, end-of-year-poll-topping 2016 house track Final Credits. By anyone’s standards, using the same source material as one of the biggest club hits of recent years, a mere 18 months after said track dominated dancefloors and festivals, is ballsy to the point of eccentricity. But then eccentricity is very much DJ Koze’s thing. At its least appealing, it finds its expression in self-consciously weird photo shoots, big on wacky costumes and “you don’t have to be mad to work here” gurning – he was pictured on the cover of Knock Knock’s predecessor Amygdala wearing a crash helmet and riding a reindeer. But a certain unbiddable idiosyncrasy also informs his music, to frequently stunning effect. You never quite know what a Koze track is going to sound like: the remixes collected on his two Reincarnations collections leapt wildly from sparse techno to disco homages to swooning pre-rock’n’roll pop to ambience, and none of them sounded much like the intricate, understated, soul-ballad-influenced electronica on Amygdala.
The tracks on Knock Knock, meanwhile, seem to exist in the intriguing spaces between genres. Pick Up is by far the most straightforward thing here. Its closest relation might be the fantastic Illumination, a collaboration with Róisín Murphy that a remixer could easily turn into a sweaty 3am club banger, but that in its current state – vocals and fragments of guitar and sax mixed far louder than the hypnotic rhythm track – takes on a mood of weird calm. Elsewhere, Muddy Funster sets Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner’s voice against drifting clouds of electronics and a sample from post-punk band the Gist’s gorgeous 1983 single Love at First Sight. Moving in a Liquid places a euphoric, richly melodic swell of sound over an off-kilter beat not a million miles from German producer Wolfgang Voigt’s glam-inspired schaffel sound, and Colours of Autumn constructs a bizarre and compelling take on R&B out of a patchwork of droning vocal samples and chicken-scratch funk guitar. Not everything works – a second Róisín Murphy track, Scratch That, is a little close to trip-hop filler – but most of it does, to frequently stunning effect. There’s something hugely satisfying about the way Bonfire sounds simultaneously warm and uneasy, its soft four-to-the-floor pulse and vocals from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon disrupted by a quietly atonal synthesiser.
It’s a collection of music so eclectic that it could easily sound scattered and messy – the distance between the trebly, lo-fi strum of José González collaboration Music on My Teeth and the warped deep house and naive, untutored vocals of Planet Hase is pretty huge – but it holds together, largely as a result of Koze’s evident interest in melody. He has a knack of coming up with tunes that are hugely appealing, but never feel hackneyed or predictable; that sound like the work of a man with an appealingly odd, personal take on pop music in its multifarious forms. And that’s what Knock Knock feels like as a whole. Not a house or techno album or a collection of choice dancefloor cuts padded out with star guests, but a glimpse into an alternate world that’s simultaneously familiar, rich and strange.
This week Alexis listened to
Chaka Khan – I Know You, I Live You (Mople™ remix)
In a world awash with disco re-edits, this is a cut above: funkier and more propulsive than the 1981 original, complete with thrilling new percussive coda.