Sleazy McQueen – Still Adrift review

Sleazy McQueen has never been your average re-edit merchant. While sweaty men with beards in New York, London and Paris fight it out over the last few remaining unedited disco records, the ponytail sporting man-about-town – Florida’s answer to Dimitri From Paris, if you will – has quietly built up a reputation as a fearless editor of unlikely tuneage.

Still Adrift, the first digital-only offering from his McQueen’s Whiskey Disco label, continues the Orlando-based producer’s obsession with AM radio favourites, cutting up – amongst others – Wings and Steely Dan. While such soft rock/AOR big guns are not perhaps the most obvious source material for disco-centric party bangers, McQueen and his happy band of helpers turn the originals into leftfield dancefloor gold.

Take “Do It Again”. Few would have seen much dancefloor potential in Steely Dan’s loose, lazy original version. At the hands of The Thrill – McQueen and an unnamed collaborator – it’s turned into a pleasingly steppy chunk of vaguely Balearic AOR disco. The same can be said of “I Keep Forgetting”. Former Doobie Brothers man Michael McDonald’s original was sickly-sweet blue-eyed soul. Here, thanks to the addition of a tough MPC break, dub effects and weighty bottom-end, it becomes a sweet end-of-night burner.

The dub disco vibe continues on “Mrs Vanderbilt”, a thumping Wings rework that turns Macca and company’s jaunty singalong into a stoned dancefloor wig-out. The package is completed by another Steely Dan rework, with “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” being turned into a hypnotic, Idjuts style groove-a-thon. It shouldn’t work, but like the rest of the EP, it really does.

Matt Anniss