Monday Moods

Jules Lefranc - Le Metro Aerien

Another selection of things I've got on; kicking off with my favourite obscure band, Alpinestars. With only 2 albums to their name and an incredibly difficult to google name you won't find an awful lot about them on the web. I picked up their second one, White Noise in my early 2000s days of picking up anything that caught my eye under the chillout section. I put it away a few years ago because I wasn't so hot on it anymore (or so I thought), I dug it out again after giving two of the standout tunes a revisit (the equally hard to google Snow Patrol parts 1 & 2). Turns out I don't have as many qualms as I thought with it, there's definitely more than a hint that it's from the era, the Moby-esque strings and guitar being one of the more obvious ones, which isn't an issue if you have a soft spot for tat kinda sound like I do. Here's Brotherhood which shows that off very well.



On that same note, and from the same year as a matter of fact, I will forever love the use of strings on Anything Is Possible from DJ Mehdi's debut. As much as I love the House & Electro of Lucky Boy and the Ed Banger era, I wish we had more of this more laid-back hip-hop style output from him. I think that I described this one on the podcast as positive trip-hop, which in hindsight isn't 100% accurate, in fact it's probably a little bittersweet given the circumstances of Mehdi's passing. But it still rings true to me a little, you can find me always returning to this one when I need a little musical pick-me-up.



And rounding off this selection of downtempo vibes is the E-Z Rollers. Tucked away on an album chock full of drum & bass are a few tracks that lean on the slower side of the BPM scale. The trip-hop reworking of Walk This Land being one of them, the jazzy elements present on the rest of the album feel just at home here as they did on the drum & bass parts. It's a little on the short side but a gorgeous listen nonetheless. Keep your ears out for a re-incorporation of a sample of Derrick May talking about techno producers from the preceding track on the album Retro



-Claude Van Foxbat