- Hitting our shores just in time for the summer season is this neatly packaged CD, with a pink coloured cardboard sleeve, fluorescent orange-pink coloured CD information sheet and an orange CD - yeah OK, we get it, it's summer, there's no need to blind us with the fact.
What we have here is a selection of current house anthems combined with a nice selection of classic disco hits. It seems that ever since Dimitri and the like started including disco classics into their new house mixes that other DJ's out there are catching onto the trend. Nothing completely wrong with the idea since our current society is usually made up of objects from the past with a new twist incorporated.
Kicking the mix off with a bit of dirty house funk, Thee Maddkatt Courtship III's My Life Musik, should get any unsuspecting crowd onto a dancefloor with it's stomping 4 to the floor beat, funky bass line and sleazy vocals.
The Fog's Been A Long Time is an anthem for those out there who haven't had any in a long time and uses a simple formula of a basic beat and powerful female vocals and is a good prelude to KC Flight's Summer Madness (Sex For Days Mix) which cheekily uses orgasm samples on top of a latin conga beat. All of this sex induced house makes way for Klein & MBO's electro styled Dirty Talk.
Azoto's San Salvador is a very familiar tune and has been sampled to create new versions. You can't go past the original though with it's latin percussion, string ensemble and orchestral horns section, however you can't but feel that the vocals sound a little on the chipmunk side.
Soul and funk legend Roy Ayers put his twist on the jazz classic Fever ("You give me fever, when you kiss me, fever all through the night"). Almost untouchable with a new bassline, funky guitar and of course latin percussion. It's a new take on a classic song that I personally have never heard.
A refreshing remix of Masters At Work's 2001 hit Work links the past to the present and this time it's more of a funky chilled groove instead of the club stomping sound of the original.
Jephte Guillaume's The Prayer breaks the flow and brings on the acoustic guitar. If you were grooving up until now then sorry, the beat gets taken out and we're left with an ambient guitar piece which slowly brings back the percussion. I really don't see why they did this as it can kill the mood. Good to see that they mixed in DJ Spinna and Ticklah's remix of Shaun Escoffery's Days Like This to bring the beat back. A personal favourite and good to see a hip hop producer making classy house tracks.
To finish it all off, Kool And The Gang's Summer Madness (if you haven't realised by now, it's the theme of this compilation) winds things down. A classic tune sampled by hip hop artists for their chilled out downtempo efforts. You can almost recognise it by the piercing synth sample at the beginning and at the end.
If you like your house music mixed with a few classics, then is almost certainly for you.