Island Boogie

Andy Meecham has impeccable dance music credentials, from his early days in OG UK rave outfit Bizarre Inc to this, his sixth album under the Emperor Machine alias, a mere 35 years later. Island Boogie is perhaps the mostly perfectly realised EM project to date, a collection of eight lengthy club tracks, built from elements of various disco sub genres — space, Italo, dub, cosmic et al — and NYC punk funk, electro and boogie, all created with his extensive analog synth collection. Eight songs with only one under six minutes, these are big records with elongated arrangements giving the grooves time to stretch out and develop, and they’re very much big in sonic terms too; pristinely produced, it’s an audiophile’s album, with a fat, rich, velvety sonic sheen and thick, dense heft to the production — it sounds wonderful. Meecham’s enlisted vocalists Séverine Mouletin and Michelle Bee for five of the songs, neatly upgrading Island Boogie from ‘merely’ a great club album into something a little more memorable. Deep, dub, twisted disco and analog cosmic hyper-boogie full of dance floor nous and not inconsiderable charm.