James Teej - Fame

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  • Sometimes you wonder just what a sample is doing there. In this case, it sounds like it's waving a white flag. For more than 11 minutes, James Teej's "Fame" cuts up small elements of David Bowie's 1975 original—a quick guitar lick here, a low piano note there—and adds Teej's own clanky, wormy synth overlays, which gradually subsume all. The groove thumps along agreeably—"Fame" is so hard to resist that James Brown himself ripped it off for "Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved)" in 1976, quite the endorsement—but I keep being distracted by the way Bowie's own voice, singing the title word, keeps threading through it. It's like a nagging, constant reminder—"Look! It's Bowie!"—where none is needed. The Dame disappears in Cisco Cisco's remix, and so does that groove, which makes way for a techy, slow build into a tumbling, tom-heavy romp, but it's too restrained to make much mark. Similarly, "City Celebrity" is a slinky, modest, discoid thumper with a sparkling little organ part, unhurried pulse and lots of atmosphere.
  • Tracklist
      A Fame B1 Fame (Cisco Cisco Remix) B2 City Celebrity
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