- Last December while in Paris, I had the chance to attend a sold-out joint Ed Banger/Institubes showcase at, well, Showcase. Everyone who is anyone on the Parisian crunchy disco-hop scene (seriously, I name scenes as I go along) was there: DJ Mehdi, Pedro Winter, Para One, Teki Latex, SebastiAn, Uffie, Feadz, Chromeo, you name ‘em. But the clou de la soirée was an ultra-rare apparition by Daft Punk’s own Thomas Bangalter, heralded via a short dithyramb by Pedro himself as the Messiah’s Second Coming. See, more than ten years after the French Filtered Revolution, Daft Punk are somehow still bearing the king’s aesthetical crown while all the other producers, old or new, are somewhat faithfully following the path the duo has carved for them.
Take for example ‘Lucky Boy EP’, the most recent DJ Mehdi outing on Ed Banger. It might take the ‘Lucky Boy’ track found on Mehdi’s 2006 long player and recast it, via vocalist Fafi’s sassy neo-rap, into softcore self-affirming feminist-lite territory (something that sounds like a lazier Uffie, if you want), or give it the remix treatment by Institubes wonderboy Surkin (bleepy Boys Noize impersonation) or Sonar Kolektiv’s own Outlines weirdos (Motownesque slo-mo piano house anyone?), but it is Thomas Bangalter that really steals the proverbial show. His overtly dramatic edit (it is nothing more, really) of the originally one-minute long ‘Signatune’ turns into an absolutely massive and mind-melting pumped-up-on-steroids synthfest last heard on Daft Punk’s own ‘The Brainwasher’. Even by not really doing anything (he just takes the album version and boosts it up 600%: probably the first time in music history a remix took less time to make than it will take you to listen to it), Bangalter still pisses from great height on everything else on what would be a simply anecdotal release from one of Daft Punk’s otherwise most promising bitc... err… pages.
TracklistA1 Lucky Girl
A2 Lucky Boy (Outlines Remix)
B1 Signatune (Thomas Bangalter Edit)
B2 Lucky Boy (Surkin Remix)