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Yolanda Be Cool & D-Cup - 'We No Speak Americano'

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Fraser McAlpine | 09:50 UK time, Thursday, 8 July 2010

Yolanda Be Cool

You might think your bedroom is a messy place. You might think your untidiest friend's laundry pile is difficult (and a bit disgusting) to navigate your way around. You may even conclude that a single bin-bag stuffed full of the entire contents of a block of flats, should such a thing be possible, would be a tight squeeze. But these things are as naught - NAUGHT, MARK YOU! - compared to the higgledy-piggledy, jumbled-up, herd-of-pink-elephants-in-a-single-sausage-skin nature of popular music.

There is so little room between different types of music, different songs, different singers, that to the untrained ear they all start to bleed into one another, even when they are not deliberately trying to. And really, when it comes to an information archive as big, wide and downright strange as pop, everyone has an untrained ear.

This then, comes as something of a relief.

(. Everyone in it looks VERY different these days.)

I mean, when Eliza Doolittle plunders the past and writes a whole new song around it, it's still touch and go as to how well her contributions match up to the old bits. This does not have to worry about such matters. It's almost entirely made up of an old song - in this case '' by Renato Carosone - which has been diced and squished by a pair of Australian DJs.

It does not have to concern itself with the pairing up of new musical ideas with old musical ideas, because apart from a skippy beat, there ARE no new musical ideas here. All they've got to do is rearrange things a bit, make sure the best bits are repeated often so that it sounds like The Fun, and we're off to the races.

That's not to say this is easy. Otherwise everyone else who has raided the jazz cupboard for dance ideas (and there are a LOT of dance and hip hop producers doing it) would be having the hits. You've still got to be able to tell what's good, what's bad, and what's so amazing it demands that those of us with the untrained ears (hello!) rush to own it.

What it doesn't do is take up any more space in the cramped confines of popular music in general. It's more of a rearrangement of what's already here, so that something previously buried can come to the top for a bit. That's the beauty of recycling.

Three starsDownload: Out now


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(Fraser McAlpine)

"I'm not sure the anonymous, hardbody pulse of this works, exactly."

"I just love the trumpet/saxophone?"

"Sounds like an Al Jolson track mixed up for today. Strange but catchy!"

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