Album: Kathy Diamond - Miss Diamond To You (Permanent Vacation)

Maurice Fulton – producer of quality music, sterling remixer, enigma and all-round crazy bastard – has always been a difficult man to pin down. Even though he does have what some might deem a trademark sound with distinct leitmotifs (slap bass, distorted, druggy synths, masses of percussion), it’s often hard to tell whether he wants to make music that’s accessible or whether he wants to challenge and weird the listener out.

Fulton productions can sometimes be strange (look no further than the riotous ‘Let’s Get Sick’ from the first Mu album or the whole of the Eddie & The Eggs album for proof), but every now and then, he goes for the jugular and makes a track that could slay a dancefloor from fifty paces or could conceivably be a crossover hit (check his remix of Hot Chip’s ‘Over & Over’ or ‘My Gigolo’ from the Stress: Why Put Me Through It? album). On Kathy Diamond’s debut full-length, Maurice Fulton has bridged the two. Miss Diamond To You is a pop-soul-disco record filtered through Fulton’s askew view on music.

From the opening track, its head-turning immediacy is clear. Perhaps it’s Kathy’s sweet, everywoman voice that makes it impact instantly, but from the word go, it’s evident that it’s Fulton who’s firing on all cylinders. Opening track, ‘Between The Lines’ is like a smoother do-over of the Grace Jones classic, ‘Nipple To The Bottle’, but with a more narcotic vibe, creating an easy, soft buzz, which dovetails neatly with Diamond’s lilting tones. It’s a sexy song, almost tangibly so, but the sex element is never crassly driven home. It’s there though, in the sinuous bassline and the over-dubbed orgiastic vocals in the chorus.

Even though Fulton’s more obvious production touchstones on this record are dancefloor-driven (West End, Prelude), there’s more than a whiff of the avant-garde about the lissome, airy guitar lines that pepper the album, akin to such vanguards as Manuel Goettsching and Michael Karoli. The cerebral edge is tempered by an ear for what makes a good pop song or club track. The lyrics are often inconsequential, in that they cover impersonal declarations of love, but Fulton uses Diamond’s voice as another instrument or layer of sound a lot of the time.

This is most evident on ‘Over’, in which Diamond’s vocal is cut-up ever so slightly, giving it a barely perceptible robotic feel. Most of the vocal’s reverb is dampened and it occasionally jumps from speaker to speaker, one word to the next, giving the vocal a wonderfully strange, jarring air that acts as a counterpoint to the music’s tight funk jam. There’s a point when the clavinet joins in with the vocal melody and it feels like a wall is broken down, allowing the diffuse nature of the music and voice up to that point a chance to dovetail, albeit briefly and it’s jaw-dropping.

Although I’ve so far chosen to highlight two songs in particular, this is an album where picking standouts seems futile. Miss Diamond To You is best experienced as a whole. It’s a dance album with a clear focus and one where there’s an idiosyncratic language at play. It’s nicely out-of-step with most other stuff that’s going on in the dance music scene and yet it’s so gettable and completely modern. When all’s said and done though and we’ve pontificated over where Fulton and Diamond were coming from until the cows (Mu?) come home, it’s essentially a pop-soul record. An odd, left-of-centre pop-soul record, but a pop-soul record all the same. Instinctual body music that’s as easy on the ear as it is stimulating to the brain.

http://www.rachaelburns.net/html/music/2007/04/kathy-diamond-miss-diamond-to-you.html