Technotronic

• Pump Up the Jam: The Album [SBK, 1989] A-
• Recall [SBK/EMI, 1994] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Pump Up the Jam: The Album [SBK, 1989]
Fitting that true house's first true smash should prove a fountainhead of formal innovation, albumizing the genre's natural configuration, the 12-inch, with followups that suggest remixes--alternate versions of Ya Kid K's unjustly maligned punk-house songtalk and the technogroove underpinning the smash. There's also a male rapper who rhymes "posse" and "bossy" (ho!). If you love the single as much as you should, the album will keep you going. And if you're in thrall to moribund aesthetics, there are other songs on it. A-

Recall [SBK/EMI, 1994]
Jo Bogaert and Patrick De Meyer prove Eurodisco is a producer's music on "2 U X," an instrumental that sets me strutting every time it sneaks up--which it can do because I tune out all the guy singer's exhortations until Ya Kid K (or is that Daisy D.?) picks him up midway through "I Want You by My Side." So if the guy's cuts fade and the girls' take me to techno church, maybe the secret of this spiritual uplift for secular people isn't Bogaert and De Meyer after all. Maybe it's the girls. A-