DJ-Kicks [Audio CD] TIGA

He might have made his name as one of the founding fathers of electroclash, but Montreal-based DJ Tiga's contribution to the DJ Kicks series proves he's got a range and talent to outlive the genre. Rather than choosing the obvious genre-defining tracks, he's hunted out some stellar remixers from the field of punk-funk and electro-pop: there's Adult twisting Jolly Music's "Radio Jolly" into a gothic pulse, DFA recasting Le Tigre as shrill disco maidens on "Deceptacon", and Trevor Jackson adopting his Playgroup guise to reinvent Chromeo's "You're So Gangsta" as a digital funk number, vibrating with stuttering electronic pin-drops, and splashed with a comfy burst of saxophone.

Tiga is, it had to be said, still one for the occasional 1980s fashion crime--resurrecting Stevie V's "Dirty Cash" for the new millennium is a thoroughly gruesome idea, and the very idea should be put wherever they put Flock of Seagulls. But he makes a remarkably good case for the rehabilitation of many of the hallmarks of the decade of excess: take Codec & Flexor's "Time Has Changed", for example, which revisits the mood of electronic melancholy once perfected by Depeche Mode but casts it within a thoroughly modern-sounding framework of glitchy futurism. --Louis Pattison