Thursday 28 June 2012

ALBUM Robert Lamm & John Van Eps – Robert Lamm Songs: The JVE Remixes

Robert Lamm Songs The JVE Remixes
Sorry reviews have been a bit thin on the ground this week… been stupid busy. But I'm gonna be spending a significant portion of the next couple of days sitting on trains, so we should be able to catch up a bit. In the meantime, here's something of a curveball of an album… it's been out a couple of weeks now but I promised! And besides, you can't listen to tech-house all day, every day you know…

If the name Robert Lamm doesn't mean anything to you, he's the singer and main songwriter from Chicago, and what this album consists of is Chicago classics from their late 60s/early 70s days as a jazz-rock-fusion outfit (ie, before they went all AOR later on), remixed by contemporary producer John Van Eps into…well, therein lies the rub. I'm not sure exactly how you'd describe the fruits of JVE's remixing labours. But "Latin-leaning, jazz-flecked downtempo grooves with a lounge bent," is the closest I could get, just off the top of my head.

Not being any kind of Chicago expert, it's the refixes of well-known tracks like 25 Or 6 To 4 and Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? that are appealing most to me. But taken as whole, this is definitely an interesting listen, even if I'll confess to being a little outside the TIWWD comfort zone trying to write about it. You can see tracks here slotting easily into Sunday chill-out sets and the like as well, so a job well done, I'd say.

About: If your leftfield sonic fancy has been tickled, you can find out more (and buy the album) at the Robert Lamm website. Oh yeah, and it's brought to you by the Blue Infinity label.

PS Some good news: one of the things I've been busy with this week, has been putting the framework in place for a TIWWD revamp, redesign and relaunch! More details soon but it's all tremendously exciting. No, really.

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