Booka Shade - Movements

This is a great release which took a while to grow on me, mostly because it modified such great tracks as "Mandarine Girl" and "Body Language", however once you understand what Booka Shade are trying to get across with this CD, it's great. These new versions of the two classics are almost as good as the originals for me now.

From the funky strains of "Night Falls" to the finality of "Hallelujah USA", this is a carefully sculpted set of moods and grooves that can take you through a wide gamut of feelings with it's tech-house goodness.

Stand out for me is "Birds & The Beats"/"At The Window", the first being a funky, club jumping track and the second being a reflective style piano piece.

Great listening.

As a child I remember being impressed by my father’s radio receiver – a huge old Kenwood, with a backlit display and a heavily weighted tuning knob that spun slowly and precisely across the frequency bandwidth. When you turned it on, the glow of the LEDs would slowly strengthen until with a little ‘click’ the unit would begin to function. It had the words ‘solid state’ written across the faceplate.
‘Movements’ too, feels solid state - an album with no audible moving parts. It’s the sounds of a super-efficient machine that has effortlessly converted its potential into kinetic energy – a master of friction. A Modernist wet dream, or ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ as the Audi people say.
But isn’t friction a good thing? To pose the question another way – try walking, try chewing – hell, try fucking without it. Yet too much and you start to smoke, you seize up, you get a nasty rash. All too human. Hasn’t techno and electronica always dreamed of overcoming the entropy of bodies, of exiting the ugly, squirting, straining and sagging of biomechanics and entering an effortless existence where everything is brushed smooth? ‘Movements’ sings with this desire, it’s an old hymn harmonised through new machines. And a brilliant one.
From the outset, the sense of purposive propulsion is abundant – so too is that this is an emotional journey. The strings might be synthesised, but they’re tugged heartstrings – not nonetheless, but because they’re artificial.
‘Night Falls’ gives the feeling of returning to somewhere – to the place of your childhood, via either autobahn or aircraft, express flight. All the tracks follow form – without a tone wasted, they somehow superefficiently mobilise your feet and your feelings. We’re going forward into the future, and if we look in the rear-view mirror to our childhoods, it’s without either the capacity or the desire to slow down, to turn back. There is a sadness in that, too – the now well-flogged ‘Mandarine Girl’ (thankfully re-worked here) conveys a palpable sense of something... gone. But what? Whenever I listen ‘Movements,’ I’m propelled back to the sublime moments of parties I never went to, years ago. Do I want to go back there? Can I go back there? Was I ever there? Have I left that longing behind, or was it ever mine to long for? Is that a bad thing, when the future ahead sounds so wonderful? I wonder.

This is definately a solid release, though, taken as a whole, it is less danceable than their first album. The stand out track for me was "In White Rooms", which, coincidentally, is going to be the first single the album yields; this song has beautiful melody, and a good thumping beat. These producers are definately talented.