Carpenter Brut - "Turbo Killer" (2016)

Hello Friends,

October's here (aka the best month) and you know what that means.

Its time to conjure up some demons and listen to some dark and twisted music.

Here's a song by French electronica artist, Carpenter Brut, whose entire catalog sounds like peak Giorgio Moroder sitting around taking MDMA while immersed in John Carpenter movies. The results are fantastic!  Soundtracks for fucked up movies that don't exist!

This just-as excellent video is directed by Seth Ickerman, who specializes in a John Carpenter-inspired, nostalgic sci-fiction look.  Amazing!

Enjoy!

Love To Love You Baby

Donna Summer - "Love To Love You Baby" (1975) - Oasis Records

Hello Friends,

Sultry sounds from the turntable tonight!

Love to Love You Baby is not only Donna Summer's first release in the U.S. (her actual first release, Lady of the Night, would only be released in the Netherlands) but it also remains a seminal release in the Disco movement of the 1970's.

The title song takes up all of Side One and boy-oh-boy is it a doozy!  A sexy, sultry and sweaty disco opus featuring Giorgio Moroder & Pete Bellotte's sparingly calculated production values with plenty of wah-wah guitar, boogieing bass lines, futuristic-sounding synthesizers and Summer's breathy and sensual vocals with orgasmic moans and ecstatic groans aplenty!

Whereas Side One is an epic of the early disco era, Side Two is a bit of a mixed bag containing more soulful ballads and less speed- and sex-fueled dance tunes.

Immediately, the party comes crashing to halt with the heartbreaking ballad "Full of Emptiness".  A great and incredibly sad song sung with unmistakable sincerity by Summer. It does come off as a bit of a buzzkill, however.

"Need-a-Man Blues" gets things (temporarily) back on track with Moroder's signature electro-funk instrumentation doing what it does best lying just below the surface!

"Whispering Waves" is another pretty ballad but ITS KILLING US.  Its sounds like a 1970's Massengill commercial!  What the hell happened to the spazzy, swirling up-tempo sleaziness of the album's first side??  My boner is slowly turning into tears!  (Although, for whatever its worth, there is some pretty nice guitar work going on here.)

Thank god that "Pandora's Box" gets us back to at least a mid-tempo shuffle!!  It actually starts out reminding us of Rundgren's "Hello Its Me", but ends up being more of a straightforward R&B song.

The side ends with a country-twinged reprise of "Full of Emptiness" (which would have been an amazing "come down" to the album if everything leading up to it was as high energy as the title track!)

As a whole, this album doesn't really work which is to be expected, historically speaking. Donna Summer was new to the scene as was the genre that she would eventually dominate!  Just the fact that a disco/dance track would take up all of a side is pretty amazing (in 1975 the only bands doing this would be prog rock/art rock bands like Yes, Genesis or Pink Floyd!)  This album captures her and Moroder in their relative infancy with Love To Love You Baby setting the table for the next half decade or so of greatness!

RATING: 4 do it to me again and again you put me in such an awful spin out of 5

Turkish Delight

Midnight Express Soundtrack (1978) - Casablanca Records

Hello Friends,

On the turntable tonight, we've got Giorgio Moroder's soundtrack album to Alan Parker's 1978 movie about a hash-smuggling American who gets caught and jailed in a Turkish prison.

Spoiler alert: Its no picnic!

Based on the (mostly) true account of Billy Hayes, the film's script was written by none other than Sir Oliver Stone.  

Very synthy & dreamlike, Moroder's soundtrack is at times haunting and powerful.  There's a couple of vocal tracks that end up sounding kind of dated and cheesey, but the 8-minute opening track alone ("Chase") is worth the price of admission.

Its so good, in fact, that it won the Academy Award for best original score for that year!

Nice job, Giorgio!  You have yet to let us down!

And remember kids, just say No!

o-o-oh billy!

RATING: 4 dreams that keep my soul alive out of 5

Just A Gigolo

American Gigolo Soundtrack - 1980 - Polygram Records

Hello Friends,

Need a quick pick me up?

We do!  So tonight we're doing cocaine listening to Giorgio Moroder's excellent soundtrack to the 1980 film, American Gigolo.  

Written & directed by the great Paul Shrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Affliction) and starring Richard Gere & Lauren Hutton, American Gigolo helped usher in the sleazy, superficial, pre-AIDS 1980s.  The soundtrack is practically a character in the film itself; its impossible to separate the two even 30+ years later.  To this day, we can't even think of Richard Gere without imagining him walking him into a gay nightclub with Cheryl Barnes's "Love & Passion" blasting!

The soundtrack album gets the party started with an 8 minute long epic version of Blondie's "Call Me" aka "The Theme From American Gigolo".  A # 1 song in both the U.S. & U.K. for several weeks, its sexy and driving and manic and it really sets the stage for the movie as well as whats to come on the rest of the record!

FUN FACT: Originally, Moroder wanted to recruit none other than Stevie Nicks to collaborate with on this soundtrack. She was unable to commit to him due to conflicts with her record label.    

"Call Me" is followed by the aforementioned, driving disco-beat of "Love & Passion" and the side ends with the sleazy-sounding, noirish instrumental, "Night Drive".

Side Two is entirely instrumental and kicks off with "Hello Mr. W.A.M.", the song heard over the film's finale.  Its also Moroder's take on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Clarinet Concerto K. 622. Its equal parts Clockwork Orange, prog rock & Studio 54.



"The Apartment", another dark instrumental, sounds like Aphex Twin remixing Dark Side of the Moon.

"Palm Springs Drive" is an instrumental take on "Call Me" and its impossible to drive around downtown Los Angeles at night, looking for johns, without having this song pulsate in your brain!

Next there's a reprise of Side One's "Night Drive" only slower and more lumbering with lots of synthy-low notes and some church bells thrown in for good measure!

Closing things is the melodic ballad, "The Seduction (Love Theme)" which comes dangerously close to sounding like elevator music-schmaltz.  But, in the context of this record, its a subtle and fitting conclusion.

RATING: 4.5 Roll Me in Designer Sheets I'll Never Get Enough out of 5