Jamie Winehouse

I'm disappointed in Jamie Lidell. But it's disappointment graded on a curve. There's no denying his jaw-dropping genius - Lidell's got the rare mix of talent and new ideas to tweak the mainstream, the way Bjork or Timbaland used to. He should be the next level, the cyber-funk soul shaman of my dreams, scatting and grunting with those licorice pipes over madness jams tricked out to within an inch of their lives. Instead he's gone off on this retro soul tangent. He's Jamie Winehouse. I want Jamie Lidell back.

All bitching aside, I'm not immune to his silly charisma or the joy fueling his jive-muppet theatrics. And I'm almost positive that Jim is going to get a lot of play come the warm months. It's just that I wish his Motown was a little bit more neon. A little bit Glo-Town.

Jamie Lidell - "Where D'You Go" [From Jim]

In the hallowed past, Lidell was one half of Super_Collider, which was like glitched-out D'Angelo, as cold and rigid as a headmaster's paddle and just as ass-slapping fierce. It was a pairing made in the heavens of perversion, with Lidell being matched pound for inventive pound by His Mad-jesty Cristian Vogel.



Vogel's bio is cooler than a bio should be. He's a refuge: his family left Chile in the '80s to escape the soul-fucking General Pinochet; a scholar - he studied electronic composition, getting his degree in 20th-century music from the University of Sussex; and all-around madman - he was a kid hacker, and that mindset still informs the deconstructionist dimentia in his productions. When he hooked up with Lidell and they started making records in their Berlin studio, there was no cure for the sickness that would come.

Super_Collider - "Cut The Phone" [From Head On]

Before they broke up, they broke the mold; twice, with Head On (1999) and Raw Digits (2002). But in between those Lidell signed to Warp and made his first solo record, Muddlin Gear (2000), which I described in an old post as unlistenable in the best way and like free jazz by R2-D2 freebasing cleaning products. But buried in the heap of droid parts was "Daddy's Car," this cold, crushed R-n-B single that I ended up putting on pretty much every mix tape I made for the next five years.

Jamie Lidell - "Daddy's Car"

Vogel, left to his own devices, did what he had been doing since '94 and kept up with releases under his own name, all with a similar twisted take on techno. But he also became a name brand for hotshit remix work and, when the tracks he did for Radiohead, Maximo Park and Thom Yorke were stood side by side with artists like Four Tet and Modeselektor, Vogel's always sounded the most moth-eaten.

Thom Yorke - "Black Swan (Cristian Vogel Spare Parts Remix)"

Cristian Vogel - "Neon Underground"

Lidell, on the other hand stopped stealing dirty cabbage from the avante garden and became Little Richard with a sampler on 2005's Multiply. And suddenly a Lidell track was in every fifth commercial. I'm not even saying he sold out. He's obviously earnest as hell about the classic mood he's been achieving on record, and maybe futurism doesn't get it up for him anymore. Still, I wish he'd bend the rules a little bit; I wish new Lidell albums sounded a little more destroyed, a little less safe. A little bit more like: