Dance On The Beat Italy Schallplatten & CDs

Review: A classic that delivers the quintessential Euro house experience with its infectious energy and irresistible dancefloor appeal. This new yellow vinyl version brings flashbacks flooding in of the era's vibrant club scene through a mix of upbeat rhythms, catchy melodies and expansive remixes. Side-1 opens with the single version of 'More & More', a track that wastes no time diving into a groove-laden beat and euphoric synth lines. The extended mix that follows stretches the vibe even further, offering DJs and dance enthusiasts a longer ride through the track's pulsating, feel-good energy. Side-2 turns up the heat with the 'Underground' remix, which injects a deeper, more nocturnal edge into the track, perfect for late-night sets. The 'Trance Mix' closes the collection with an ethereal, sweeping take on the original, merging classic Euro house elements with hypnotic trance influences. This release is a love letter to the era of extended pleasure through remixes, capturing both the mainstream appeal and underground allure of Euro house.

Review: French Affair was a German-French dance-pop band that emerged at the dawn of the new millennium and had some heart success between 2000 and 2023. 'My Heart Goes Boom (La Di Da Da)' is one of them and 'Sexy' is another. It gets reissued here with several different mixes making it more suitable to club play and is an irresistibly bold, upbeat tune that collides infectious house drums with catchy, sultry vocals. The production is polished, with deep basslines and crisp percussion and a smooth vocal delivery adding a layer of steamy allure. This one is both seductive and fun and perfect for playful sets in the sun.

Review: A timely reminder of the enduring power of classic house music. Originally released in 1991, 'Rise Up' is a certified anthem, its infectious energy and uplifting piano chords transporting listeners back to the golden age of house music. This reissue features the original mix on the A-side, a timeless piece of dancefloor history that continues to inspire and uplift. But the real treat lies on the flip, where Vandalism delivers a remix that injects a contemporary twist via a driving bassline and fruity synths. A guaranteed mood booster and a reminder of the timelessness of classic house music.

Review: Fedde le Grand's 'Put Your Hands Up 4 Detroit' shocked the world on first release, notably sampling Matthew Dear and Disco D's 1999 classic track 'Hands Up For Detroit'. The Netherlands electro-house cut is a worthy enticement for any floor-hardened modern listener; Flamingo Recordings oversaw its peak at number 4 before gaining traction across Europe. The official lyrics, as confirmed by le Grand, are "put your hands up for Detroit, our lovely city"; and a futuristic music video, directed by Marcus Adams, was filmed in a former Safeway HQ in Hillingdon, London, depicting a dystopian lab where androids are tested for human responses, ending in a system-wide shutdown after one discovers his own artificial identity. There's plenty of visual cultural material to psychoanalyse here, but we've no time; all we can say for now is that this one's a speedy sonic electroshock and a maximal noughts dance record, doing similar vibe mileage as Freestylers, Foreign Beggars or Benny Benassi.

Review: Way back in 2008, Romanian dance-pop producer Edward Maya scored a global hit with Vika Jigulina hook-up 'Stereo Love' - a slick, hooky song (complete with obligatory noughties auto-tune vocal effects) wrapped in jaunty, turbo-folk influenced accordion motifs and various nods to the EDM end of the house music spectrum. This reissue boasts three versions first released in the late noughties - the superior extended mix, radio edit and Moella's tougher, tribal house-tinged interpretation - and what appears to be a previously unreleased Mia Martina 'extended remix'. That boasts some swirly effects and slightly chunkier beats, but otherwise sticks closely to Maya's chart-bothering original mix.

Review: This was the debut single from Italian dance crew Prezioso & Marvin back in April 1999. It soon made waves as an international hit that bothered the top ten of charts around the world. It has all the hallmarks of a Euro dance classic of that time - the happy drums and trance chords, the camp vocals and a sense of optimism that defined the dawning of a new millennium, as well as some hella catchy pop hooks. This white vinyl reissue offers up various different versions for some retro fun.

Review: They say that everything goes in 20-year cycles, from music to fashion to film. The reissue of this trance-dance classic just about chimes with that - it was a huge crossover club and radio hit at the dawn of the new millennium and embodied the Ibiza superclub era with its shiny beats and euphoric melodic overtones. It is one of a few that Sash! turned out back then but remains his most iconic. The more youthful end of the dance spectrum is very much into these sounds at the moment, as well as hard dance and trance, so it is likely to be huge all over again this summer, no matter which of the different times you pick from.

Review: One of the many songs that defined a distinct, hot, made-for-TV dance-pop era, Martin Solveig and Dragonette's 'Hello' is an energetic electro house rouser, and made waves with its tennis-themed back-and-forth music video, which allegorised the gone-bad relationship narrativised in the song. Now pressed to sporty white vinyl, this is a warm-up song if there ever was one, with its lead two-note piano riff clipped to searing, overdriven proportions. Dragonette's vocals sing of romantic vascular sweats, caused by botched inter-relational backhands, poor get-back-at-you swings, and triple bagel defeats. This version comes with a 2024 'Super Edit', bringing a stuttering progressive house continuation.

Review: Reissued through Dance On The Beat, Storm's debut self-titled EP from 1998 gets a fresh reissue, doing best justice to the incarnation of the release put out via Positiva Records, which heard the original club mix sit side-by-side with remixes from Man With No Name (real name Martin Freeland) and Rollercoaster (Koen Groeneveld, Addy van der Zwan & Jan Voermans). Storm, in turn, were Markus Loffel & Rolf Ellmer, whom together laid down this debut dirge as a new exploration in trance music. The titular 'Storm' is an authentically tense, cyclonic trance whirl; the track proves that the genre need not just be thought of in gushingly emotive or ecstatic terms, that it can also be unnervin, sublime. Freeland and Rollercoaster's versions harness increasingly more barometer-shattering beats, like Raiden gods in command of supercells.

Review: Fronted by Dane-dame Sannie Carlson, Whigfield was backed by various producers and engineers over the years, main among whom was the towering Larry Pignagnoli. *The* song to commemorate Whigfield by, 'Saturday Night' is a Europop and Eurodance trailblazer, harking back, perhaps, to a more glamorous time, where fashion designers rubbed shoulders with models, PR girls and riviera DJs for Italian and Danish upper crusts. Carlson would record 'Saturday Night' after meeting fellow DJ Davide Riva, who was also part of a music production duo. In three days, an (in your mind-) sticky, bubblegum-popping opus would be written, with a nursery-rhyming refrain and a jaunty na-na-na hook epitomising the notion of a "hair-dryer song", a term coined by Simon Cowell in reference to the song as a precursor to Rebecca Black's 'Friday': "the kind of song girls sing into their hair dryers before getting ready to go out."