WAMDUE PROJECT – "King Of My Castle"

The vocals by Gaelle Adisson were lipsynched in the video and on stage by an Argentinian model, scuppering any chance for Adisson to capitalize on its success. Why this was deemed acceptable in the wake of Milli Vanilli escapes me.

The track itself seems fine, nothing extraordinary. 5.

Aw man, this is a great pop song and I’ve never even BEEN to a nightclub*. One of the videos was a compilation of clips from Ghost in the Shell (the first Western AMV?), which must have been TERRIBLY hip in 1999.

Anyway, the vocal hook is great, the boingy synth line is even better, the incredibly synthetic ‘poing’ sound that comes up a couple of times is best (remind me in 2014 when we hit another song that gets a surprising amount of mileage from an occasional poing). A little joy: [7]

*technically a lie but it wasn’t my choice and I didn’t enjoy it much

I’ve never been a clubber but I enjoyed this at the time and I like it now. The repetition of the vocals – no verses here – and that thudding industrial beat give it a rather hypnotic quality. I like how airy and detached her vocals are too, it gives what could have been quite a heavy handed song room to breathe.

Not my genre of choice in general, but one of 1999’s more intriguing chart toppers.

Also notable for possibly the most frequently mis-heard lyric in a dance hit since Gala and her lover’s strong beliefs. Free in my trasseau? Trousseau? I had no idea what that might mean (she’s actually singing ‘trapped soul’ obviously) but it just added to the mystique at the time.

6.

Dreary washing-machine stuff for the most part; the track-makers aren’t even trying here, nothing builds, nothing moves, and we’re bored to tears by about 2m in. I mean, sure, you’d dance to this if there were no alternatives, if no other dance music had ever been made, but otherwise? One of the crappier octaving bass sounds I’ve ever heard:
2

P.S. Well done Tom on cranking these reviews out, and happy holidays to everyone.

I find the minimalism of KOMC rather attractive (without realizing there was a whole Black Box situation over the singer. Tut tut, this is really not acceptable at all, in fact), but none the less agree (I think) with Matt DC at #8 that this is the sound of the closing of an era musically. One can find the antecedents of this sort of thing on various labels (white or otherwise) as far back as, at least, ’89, and consider Positiva and others positively churning out the stuff a few years after that…to this at number one almost at the end of the decade. No innovation, nothing remarkable, but with a breathy freshness characteristic of this model of deep house (this is what we called this, broadly, right? The current incarnation of the term is rather different….).

No 1 material? In a time of less high-turnover chart-topper churn, almost certainly not. But in 1999, for one week, it’s neither the most objectionable nor the most incongruous member of the no 1 club.

6

Fifth straight Popular entry that made no impact in America…unlike the others this one’s actually by an American. Despite never being into clubbing, I usually like this type of music, but this just seems dull and repetitive. 4/10 sounds about right.

Ah! Mark, you got there first. Yes it came out on their dance spin-off label run by Chris Abbott whose name I shamefully can’t remember. It says a lot about Creation in 1999 that they issued it first but still dropped the ball.

@#1: That “Milli Vanilli” thing is very much usual in dance music. Most of the singers in these tunes are mere session musicians, with no particular visual appeal; hence the recurrent gimmick of filling the promos with miming models.
We actually had that same thing ocurring a bit earlier in the year, when Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” reached #2. The girl miming in the video wasn’t the actual singer, but just another hired model. The next promos, though, would feature the actual singer.

Umm…yeah, well it’s that branch of dance that I’m not entirely fond of. There’s some rather perfunctory, clumpy-clumpy beats and some nice little touches like the flute motif, but on the whole I agree with Tom. Outside the club, this makes little sense. I remember the anime video from MTV (late night post-watershed showing because, boobies), and a few radio plays, but with little going on, those beats just marked time until the next track came along. I’m all for minimalism, but this feels like wading through treacle. I’m more open to an uptempo, busier remix, like this one by Sander Van Doorn:
http://youtu.be/OMs0PZywruc

5 is about right.

#17: So I gather, but in this case the singer’s visage seems perfectly appealing to me (see Google images) (see also 2014 bunny which sticks two fingers up to narrow notions of visual appeal). A substitute in the video is dodgy but might be justifiable on some level (but not really), but keeping up the pretense by having the model lipsynch in live performances goes too far, I reckon, when it’s denying a young singer her break.

It was Eruption, so I’m not sure if Chris Abbott was involved.

Misha (McGee’s mate from on holiday) and Technique (McGee’s wife) were Creation’s priorities in 1999 though, so a no.1 single slipped through their fingers.

They also dropped Kevin Rowland’s My Beauty like a hot potato around the time of King Of My Castle. I wish it sounded as extreme as its cover, but I found it very tame.

Re23: Mishka! I had forgotten all about him. There was an inordinate number of terrible signings in the history of Creation, but none ever felt more wrong than this coffee-shop reggae bollocks merchant. Basically, the annoying trustafarian playing Bob Marley covers down the beach who you chuck a shoe at (according to Wikipedia: ‘He represented Bermuda in 1991 and 1992 in the windsurfing world championships’). Fuck me.

Must be a reason why I’m free to mud wrestle

@28 It sold 14 copies, the singles-buying market being at its nadir?

Since we’re onto trivia questions, here’s one – not relevant to this record, but if I put this somewhere more relevant it’d be too obvious. Where is Haus Schliechte, and why is it – almost – connected to Popular? (Clue – you’ve quite likely seen it in the last week or so).

Oh, I thought at first it was ‘Biggest jump to number one’ but/and I looked it up and the week before it had charted on import at 61. So maybe that’s possible.

I know the answer to 31, but I have learnt lessons from something which happened 12 months ago (ed – checks date). See, you posed the question yesterday and I don’t think it would be right for me to share things freely within 24 hours. If I did, you might decide that in future you’d share things with other people, to spare you pain and torment.

The most unilkely Number 1 of the year (ATB aside). I found it decent at the time but it’s not something I’ve seeked out since. More like the sound of most people’s early noughites ringtone than a Number 1.

Still though would rather have this than ‘Better off Alone’. ‘The Launch’ or ‘Freestyler’ if I had a choice.6

Dont know if this would be a track that signals the end of an era for dance .There was still some proper stuff to look forward to in 2000/01. Sandstorm, Time to Burn,Zombie Nation, Chase The Sun, and at least 2 bunnies.

Must be a reason why I’m queen of my pretzel?

The “crunchy” beat certainly stands out from the off, and yes the vocal is beguiling to begin with, but this is a 3.30 record that deploys its last idea at about 1.10, apart from the idea of engineering the verse to sound like it’s down a crackly phone line one time around. Tedious. (Actually 1.10 is good going by the standards of certain bunnies to come – thinking of one Steve Winwood-indebted bunny in particular.)

Incidentally, if anyone is still puzzled by the question at #31, Haus Schliechte is the chalet in the Swiss ski resort of Saas-Fee where the “Last Christmas” video was filmed – although the interiors were filmed elsewhere. The chalet and resort held 30th anniversary celebrations earlier this month!

Apparently the biggest-selling single in the history of the pioneering House music label Strictly Rhythm, “King Of My Castle”‘s determined minimalism is more enervating than hypnotic; Wamdue Project was essentially Atlantean producer Chris Brann with singer Gaelle Addison adding the rather bored sounding four-line roundelay vocal. Its spaces are deep, punctuated mainly by grunts of “uh-huh” and ghosts of seventies funk flutes, but it plods along rather dully. “Must be the reason why I’m king of my castle,” she strangely sings, or signifies, going on to declare (over and over) that she’s “free in my threshold” and “making examples of you.” Since said reason is never revealed, and blankness is situated where there should be mystery, it sounds nonsensical in a am-I-bothered kind of way; not that such things matter at two a.m. in a suburban nightclub, having just downed one’s sixth Bloody Mary, where its hugely hidden majesty was no doubt revealed – and its sliding scale of biting-back, vaguely martial snare-cracking beats may have been the crucial factor. Since I indulge in neither, it simply remains a barely functional dance track; whereas a pioneering minimalist House track such as Mr Fingers’ “Washing Machine” from 1986 relies on even fewer elements, but I could both listen and dance to it forever.

Comments #30 and #32, that’s a great bit of trivia.

I quite like this – no classic, but plenty enjoyable. 6/10 is fair.

This week saw a lot of 90s indie acts cram in one last hit before the decade expired – Blur, Lightning Seeds and Ocean Colour Scene all entered the charts lower down the top 40. Also Garbage narrowly missed the top 10 with their underrated Bond theme The World Is Not Enough – that one has the honour of being the first Bond movie I saw in the cinema, so I’ve a soft spot for both the film and the theme song.