Tags: Disco Not Disco

Review: The Crates Motel crew make a head turning debut here with this inaugural release featuring some red hot classic all reworked with great care and plenty of dancefloor aplomb. Up first is 'Eye No You', a belting vocal cut with big disco energy that will have the floor in raptures. Things get slower and funkier on 'Beyond Far' with its loose and live drums and withering chords under a familiar riff. On the B-side the temp gets turned up again with 'More Eye', a Philly disco cut complete with lavish strings and raw male vocals full of heart wrenching soul. Last of all is 'Rock The Dance', a disco version of an epic Clash cut that is pure fun.

Review: While this fabulous album may sound old - as if it was an obscure, jazz-funk-tinged Italian disco release from 1982 - it is in fact brand, spanking new, making it the first new LP of original material released by legendary Italian imprint Best Record in over four decades. Created by Raffaele 'Whodammy' Arcella and Cosimo Cosmo Mandorino, it offers the same kind of boundary-blurring fusion of early '80s boogie, electro, low-tempo Italo-disco, jazz-funk, disco, Afro-cosmic and colourful Balearic pop (with a few cheeky raps and spoken word vocal passages thrown in) as the Neopolitan albums of the early-to-mid 1980s that inspired them. It's a brilliant set all told - one that authentically pays tribute to their influences and inspirations while offering something genuinely new and exciting.

Review: Few electronic music producers can claim to have made quite as big an impact as Arthur Baker. During the 1980s the New Yorker was involved in creating (or mixing) a string of ground-breaking electro, freestyle and proto-house records, before becoming one of the most in-demand remixers on the planet. This vast box set, which includes six weighty slabs of vinyl and an informative insert, celebrates his legacy, offering up a mixture of pioneering productions (Afrika Bambaata and Soulsonic Force's 'Planet Rock', 'Walking On Sunshine' by Rockers Revenge, 'Confusion' by New Order), dancefloor anthems (Freez's 'I.O.U', his enormous rework of Fleetwood Mac's 'Big Love') and a string of essential but lesser-celebrated revisions - all presented in full-length, DJ-friendly form. In a word: essential.