Services For Your Desire

I'm still unclear about what or who makes up A Touch Of Class ever since hearing their compilation A Touch of Class - Sucks! from a few years back (are they just a label? are they their own band? why are they trying to confuse us?), but I know they've got a magic touch with everything (releases, remixes... and class, I guess?).

Four years later, ATOC has already released follow up compilation, A Touch Of Class - Still Sucks!, which I haven't managed to get a copy of yet, but I wanted to bring your attention to one of the artists they remixed, and how crazy mad I am at myself for not paying more attention to.


("Element Of Danger" music video)

This band in reference is the Brooklyn duo Services, who've just had the single from their two-year old album, Your Desire Is My Business (another album I don't have yet), remixed by MSTRKRFT and ATOC in the past year. But the original version to this single, "Element Of Danger," grabbed my attention immediately. It's a fresh take on the electronic/guitar rock sound that I can't really compare to anything else without problems.

I sampled clips of the album off iTunes, and it sounds like they go into electro death rock at times, but the new music on their MySpace sounds promising (and a new album for this year, perhaps?). If you want the MSTRKRFT remix, you're out of luck. Here's the album version, yeah!


Services - "Element Of Danger"

Mon Maison Votre Maison

The latest Kitsuné Maison compilation (3) has been growing on me lately, more than the first two did. The more I hear Freeform Five's "Home Wit U" (whose vocals channel Bernard Sumner of New Order, at least to me) the more 3 tops my list. The Simian Mobile Disco track "I Believe" is straight out of the now-defunct Simian's third album that never was. But the one track that I always wait for in anticipation to come up is Alex Gopher's "Motorcyle (Wet Clutch Short Edit)" a track too French to be MSTRKRFT but too MSTRKRFT to be Alex Gopher.

From what I am familiar with, Gopher came out with his first full-length in 1999 with You, My Baby & I riding the wave of the '99 French House scene and channeling as much dance-funk as Cassius's sound at the time. The last I heard of him was the superb collab with Julien Delfaud & Etienne De Crécy for Super Discount 2's "Fast Track" aka "Someone Like You," the best dance single from 2004, if you ask me.

Now we get this new single show up in Maison 3 that has Alex Gopher channeling electro-disco house at its finest, and MSTRKRFT should be jealous. But of course Gopher's track has that special French twist to it, like Sprite Remix with its tropical fruit twist on the old taste. Let's hope this new year will see more of Alex Gopher; in the meantime, check out his track!


Alex Gopher "Motorcyle (Wet Clutch Short Edit)"