:: Rated G

Illpick1

They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Thankfully, this is a good LP. I was supposed to interview the producer of this posthumously released LP by Sydney producer/ DJ Ilpickl to try to ‘establish Ilpickl as a world-class producer, someone who was integral to the Australian scene’ or something like that. The album speaks for itself though. Kind of a post-Garage house, with flavours of cocaine disco and the broken beats that signaled the beginning of modern house, Rated G is tight. ‘Your Love’, is exceptional vocal house, while ‘Rock This Way’ is pure disco hedonism, but modernized. It’s a party album, left behind by someone playing the biggest party of all right now to the great scorer. I guess that means we can judge the music more objectively, since there isn’t any personality to attach it to, like Hendrix for the last two generations…an afro-acid legend, the music stands alone somehow. F**k context, though. This is tight production with more funk than you can shake a stick at. I don’t care if a one-legged, hump-backed dwarf with a speech impediment recorded it. If he had, you can bet your ass he would be dancing some screwed up dance to it, and so should we. The last American Indians did a ghost dance, a requiem for their dead nation, a proverbial pointless act in retrospect. Let us make our own ghost dance for the murder of dance music in the free world that’s happening. Let Illpickl be our patron saint.