Kathy Diamond "Miss Diamond To You" (OUT NOW!)

[busyboy]

Her album can be classified as retro-disco (see the reviews below for better descriptions). Her songs remind me of Roisin Murphy, though more relaxed and less rhythmically obsessed. I also hear 80's R&B elements, as well as a general synth pop influence.

Her album, Miss Diamond To You, is good, IMO, and was released in the UK last May (of course it can be found on the Internet quite easily). Check out her MySpace page to listen to "Over".



1. Between The Lines
2. In All You See A Woman
3. All Woman
4. I Need You Here Right Now
5. Until The Sun Goes Down
6. Created And Enhance
7. Moment
8. Over
9. However You Get Here
10. Racing Thru Time
11. Another Life
12. On And On
13. I Need You
14. Another Life

[busyboy]

Village Voice entry...

Kathy Diamond's Psychedelic Space-Disco
by Tom Breihan

Last month, I wrote an entry about a few new mini-genre trends that I saw emerging, all of which took little bits and pieces of electronic dance music and ran with them. My favorite of the three by far was swirly percussive post-noise, not really a catchy name but whatever. The only two real examples I had were Soft Circle's Full Bloom and Gang Gang Dance's live shows, but I definitely liked the idea that all these postpunk types were simultaneously discovering the pleasures of hazy dancing-on-clouds psychedelia and full-bore endless-repeat club music. I really liked the Soft Circle album, which approached that fusion firmly from the experimental-psychedelic side of things, finding room for rippling echoed drum-thumps in its seas of reverbed-out guitar-noodles and wordless chants. But lately I've been even more taken with another album, one that combines the same sounds but filters them through a different set of prisms, taking dance toward psych instead of taking psych toward dance. That album is Kathy Diamond's Miss Diamond to You, a disco record that pushes its sound outward toward its retro-futuristic logical conclusions.

I downloaded Miss Diamond to You a few weeks ago after reading a few recommendations, and it remains a vague and mysterious piece of work even on the twentieth listen. The album won't be commercially released until May, and even then it'll be a British import. So in a way, the album just emerged suddenly out of a void, stamped with a name and little else. I haven't been able to find any interviews with Diamond anywhere online, and half the Google results for her are actually for someone named Kathy Diamond Davis, apparently a woman from Oklahoma City who wrote a book about dog therapy, definitely not the same person. Also not a lot of help is Diamond's MySpace page, which only tells us that she's from Sheffield, that she lives in London now, and that she once self-released a single called "Miracles Just Might." She's as shadowy a presence on her own album as she is on the internet. All of the songs on Miss Diamond to You are long but not too long, hovering in the six-minute range, lazily stretching their sounds out but never letting them get tedious. Like every other element in the mix, Diamond's voice usually comes coated in layer upon layer of reverb, and it goes silent for long stretches, letting the bongo-ripples and Seinfeld bass-popping do the heavy lifting as often as not. In a lot of ways, Miss Diamond to You is pretty similar to another piece of mysterious European retro-Italo fluff that I absolutely loved, Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance. But the naive, wounded character of Shapiro's voice was the primary driving force behind Disco Romance, and Diamond's voice has virtually no character whatsoever; it's a soft, breathy blank, another effect in a mix full of them. Her lyrics immediately dissipate as soon as they hit the ear, and her coo never strains to reach any big notes. In her own way, she's every bit as unlikely a disco diva as Shapiro. Her vocals certainly don't convey passion or conviction or furor; if they evoke any emotion at all, it's a sort of warm contentedness. One "Until the Sun Goes Down," one of the album's best songs, Diamond herself doesn't even show up in the mix for the first four minutes. Instead, we hear a riot of multilayered percussion and whistle-blasts that eventually give way to a dizzily undulating organ-echo and then, finally, a vocal. There's a lot going on in that extended intro, but it never feels spazzy or anarchic. Even at its most fevered, the track muffles and smooshes all its pieces together into a blanketing goo. It's tough to imagine dancing to this stuff, but it sure makes for great rainy-afternoon music.

All of the album's production comes from Maurice Fulton, a house producer originally from Baltimore who I mostly know as the instrumental half of the noisy electro duo Mu. Plenty of critics loved Mu's two albums, but I couldn't find much to like in them beyond a few isolated tracks. I always thought that most of their tracks would make pretty good dance songs if left unmolested, but instead they sabotaged themselves by injecting spazzy little glitches and horrible screeches wherever possible. On Miss Diamond to You, Fulton stops trying to derail his own beats and does the opposite, surrounding those pulses and twitches with clouds of sound that only serve to enhance the hypnotic zone-out effect. Earlier today, Nick Sylvester wrote something about how the album reminded him of Crystal Waters, and today I learned from this bio that Fulton actually apprenticed with the Basement Boys, the Baltimore house duo who produced her biggest hits, even doing some programming work for Waters. I went back today and revisited "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" and "100% Pure Love," something I totally recommend doing right now. And I can hear the parallel; the Waters tracks are sharper and harder, but they have the same lush, airy sheen. On Miss Diamond to You, Fulton takes those sounds and gives them a certain meditative sadness, slowing them down and spacing them out. I love the idea that Fulton has had these sounds bouncing around in his head for a couple of decades now and that he's still finding new things to do with them, and I'm tempted to say that Miss Diamond to You belongs to Fulton at least as much as it does to Diamond. But then again, assigning credit is a really dicey thing to do with an album like this one. As much as I like it, I don't really know a damn thing about it.

[busyboy]

Pitchforkmedia review...

Kathy Diamond
Miss Diamond to You
[Permanent Vacation; 2007]
Rating: 7.8

It's not hard to imagine a time when music comes from increasingly obscure sources, out from a corner of the smallest bedroom in an apartment shared by four people blogging about four different records, arranging tours on the fly (with about a 50-50 ratio of confirmed dates to TBAs), producing impeccable hybrid music for god knows what audience of downloaders and strangely bedfellowed word-of-mouthers. I'm not just talking about experimental stuff either, but "pop" and "dance" and "indie," and did I mention "pop"? It's not hard to imagine this because it's already happening. Chances are, you or someone you know has turned out a track in the last few months that sounds suspiciously accomplished, oddly amazing, and perhaps even deserving of widespread recognition; sure, software and various electronic machinery make music production easier, but they don't necessarily make it "good," which is why people like Maurice Fulton, Kathy Diamond, and [insert your friend here] are such badasses.

Fulton has been making and house and future-soul tracks for more than a decade under the guise of at least a dozen aliases and (usually) short-lived groups-- which means, you can't exactly call him a bedroom producer. However, in the best indie tradition, he manages to maintain an almost iconoclastic, stubbornly outsider profile. His fans (hello there) endlessly sing his praises while his gigs go late into the night and attract a weird mix of clubbers, hipsters, and electro-musos, but his MySpace blog posts can read like rants from an exiled deviant, going so far as to blacklist any potential "friends" repping for a certain hated former label. His records with wife Mutsumi Kanamori as Mu feature some of the best electronic, dance-ish music of the decade, yet still seem on the outer fringe of what you'll hear in a club on any given night.

Diamond's résumé isn't as full, but she's hardly less independently minded. Originally from Sheffield, UK (Fulton's current residence), she describes the long, frequently frustrating road to self-releasing her music on her MySpace bio, and though that kind of story is hardly rare for independent musicians, the quality of the songs on her debut album is. Miss Diamond to You (with production credits for Fulton, though "performed" by his Syclops alias) is hard soul for beardos. However, it's also got hooks all over the place, accentuated by Fulton's never-intrusive mix of rock drums ("programmed" of course), funky bass (definitely not programmed), and a countless array of synth patches that he uses both sparingly and to perfect accompanying effect. And yes, there's something about the record that sounds borne of a couple of people holed up in a small Sheffield studio; perhaps it's consistency of the sound from track to track, or maybe it's just the top-heavy, ultra-compressed timbre of Diamond's vocals which sound a bit on the demo-y side compared to, I don't know, Timbaland producing Nelly Furtado.

Still, the songs and the beats don't lie: This is a good record. Diamond's vocal melodies in tunes like opener "Between the Lines" or her underrated 2006 single "All Woman" are airy but syncopated and percussive at just the right moments, as any melody worth its pop has to be. Her "watch me, see me, love me, push me, pull me" over Fulton's tight arrangement of slap bass, handclaps, and funky chicken-scratch guitar is like hearing Kylie Minogue perform with Chic, and when Fulton brings in the cavernous echo and salsa percussion on "Until the Sun Goes Down", what could easily have sounded overstuffed and eye-rollingly "eclectic" just comes out like a self-contained block party. Indeed, when the snare figure comes in, shortly succeeded by the churning, Tangerine Dream-y synth patterns (an increasingly hip sonic reference for dance producers), the track could pass for a break in a Mu song. And then Diamond comes in with the vocal, and it becomes immediately apparent: This is Pop.
Ultimately, I guess that's part of the only disappointing aspect of the record. Where these songs beg to be played loud for large numbers of happy people, the vaguely homemade sound occasionally compacts what should be expansive. Make no mistake, subtle details of record mastering or mixing aren't enough to sink the songs, and if you heard this stuff in a DJ set between, say, a Lindstrøm track and a Deodato re-edit, you wouldn't notice anything except how hard it was tell which tracks were new and which were from 1983. And even then, you probably wouldn't care: The modern independent musician not only refuses to die, she's getting better and better every night.

-Dominique Leone, May 18, 2007

[busyboy]

Cokemachine Glow review...

Kathy Diamond
Miss Diamond to You
(Permanent Vacation; 2007)

Rating: 64%
Combined Rating: 66%

Here's a record that's musically all of one idea: create disco pop completely via cutting-edge house technique, meaning heftier but still precise drum programming, digitally edited bits of live instrumentation, and a careful ear for sound placement. And, in this case, lots of slap-bass.

Mu's Maurice Fulton is as able a programmer and producer to recruit for that task as any, and that's where Miss Diamond To You most obviously succeeds. The bass lines are funky and thick, often dominating the mix, while the programmed drums stipple the space that Fulton smartly uses as the third primary instrument. Deft key lines simulate disco excess in their glitzy texture while their actual melodic and harmonic workings are limited, balanced -- palatable. Standout "Over" moves on a piano loop, a woodblock hit, and a synth bass that chortles over in the left speaker before key solos send the chassis spinning at opportune times between Miss Diamond's coos. The end of the track reveals a supple bass line underpinning the whole smooth mess. The song pretty fairly represents a record that sounds both more advanced and more committed to the disco aesthetic than, say, Madonna's current phase (and should Miss Diamond decide to shoot a video where she gallivants about in a legless one-piece, I probably won't feel the need to poke an eye out). It's a record that's also probably the most easily digested testament to Maurice Fulton's talent, which makes it a valuable aid to all the Fulton zealots (no, seriously, they're out there) who can't get their friends to sit through blistering, radioactive shit like Afro Finger and Gel (2003).

But if Fulton's hard stuff sends Mutsumi Kanamori into conniptions just trying to make her cries heard over the pounding, it feels like Diamond's tamer needs force Fulton to hold back. And this social function that Miss Diamond To You serves for its titular debutante is where it most obviously fails -- and in the very fact that this album is essentially nothing more than an impeccably produced announcement party. Fulton's an inspired pick for the DJ, but the uninteresting honoree of the celebration feels like a flat-note end to his serenading.

Miss Diamond herself sings soft nothings like "the butterflies are melting me" in a soft nothing voice that might as well be described as the sound of butterflies melting. She's a disco diva that conveys very little sense of fun or personality, her approach desexualized and dry. I don't buy the idea that her voice is just another instrument that Fulton's using, because Fulton bends over backwards to make sure she gets at least equal standing with his compositions, even if it's only in the spaces between where he's sweetly wanking. Plus, consider that he even makes time for her, his productions taking awkward steps back into accompanying verse forms before he continues with the jamming. In the first two-thirds of "Until the Sun Goes Down" Fulton builds incredible momentum before Miss Diamond enters and stops the polyrhythmic stomp dead in its tracks. "Racing Thru Time" is the other way around; Fulton closes the track with a steadily layered percussive breakdown that makes one wish the rest of the track hadn't bothered with the vocals -- that the instrumental had been allowed to grow in a way as dictated by the music rather than the song form.

In a way, then, the imposition of pop and disco genre -isms is both boon and curse on Fulton's showcasing; it gives him parameters within which he can flex some impressive skill sets and makes room for some of his more subtle talents, but it limits his visceral impact. Then he and his collaborator simply fail to achieve some of pop's objectives. Headphones will treat this album kindly, but the cumulative effect of the songs at a party -- where an album like this should want to be played -- is enervated by Miss Diamond's dullness and the uneven pacing that results. All of the actual songs are over five minutes, so there isn't much that feels like a single, and the disco-by-house pastiche that's being attempted here causes most of the tracks to fall into very similar rhythms, structures, and emotive tonalities. There's an abundance of micro-swells, but where's the album's moment to burn the house down?

But shit if there isn't some sick slap-bass on this thing. "All Woman" for President.

Chet Betz

[busyboy]

Stylus review...

Kathy Diamond
Miss Diamond to You
Permanent Vacation
2007
A

a more cynical universe—i.e. the one that more/less exists outside the few hundred words of this beaming review—would insist that London’s Kathy Diamond shouldn’t have gotten further than the first slap-bass figure of her debut disco-electro-funk single “All Woman.” The song’s like a positive force “Ain’t Nobody,” the wedding-band staple by Chaka Khan, who herself sang the similarly titled smash “I’m Every Woman.” That song, if you recall, got redone by Whitney Houston in the early ‘90s, then it soundtracked the Oprah Winfrey Show for a few years. So now we’re talking about a song, called “All Woman,” with 1) slapbass, a once-powerful flourish ruined for most of us by Flea and Les Claypool; 2) sonic similarities to Rufus & Chaka Khan, most of whose repertoire has not aged well *at all*; 3) a singer who indirectly recalls an obnoxious TV personality who gives away free cars to everybody’s moms except our own.

And yet I loved “All Woman,” and I love Diamond’s Miss Diamond To You. A lot of this had to do with its producer Maurice Fulton, an elusive Baltimore/New York/London-living studio man whose remix work I first encountered on the Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers” 12", and whose two albums with wife Mutsumi Kanamori under the name Mu made inroads with the internet indie set. Fulton’s a fantastic drum and synth patcher, his auxiliary percussion loops fluttering deep in the background, often meant more for feeling than for hearing, his live instruments sampled then chopped up digitally, rare precision given to analog oomph. Except for maybe the DFA’s, you’d be hard-pressed to find better “live-sounding” drum programming. Then there’s Fulton’s sense of vocal tracks, how he stylizes them with manipulations both hardly and harsh, how he democratizes tracks by making vocals just another one of his loops, sometimes a prominent one, other times not.

Except turns out I have heard Fulton before his “HOJL” dub: He did some drum programming for Crystal Waters’ “100% Pure Love,” which may be the first time I had ever heard house music. Which I find interesting because the way Fulton puts borrowed house, disco, electro, and funk in service of pop R&B on Diamond’s debut LP is pretty similar to a song like “100% Pure Love,” though the percentages this time lean slightly more towards disco and funk.

The bass, often slapped, propels a lot of these songs: “The Moment” is another “All Woman” but with fatter piano chords that remind me of Stevie Wonder’s “As,” convicted, and thumping with its chorus’s anticipation: “I’m waiting for the moment / That I can be alone with you.” “Another Life” is minimal by contrast, just a boisterously funky slap-bassline which takes Diamond’s voice for ambient dressing.

Vocally I keep hearing Chaka Khan, and to be clear, that’s not at all a bad thing. Khan has a broader range than Diamond, and a more faceslapping-/heelslamming-type alpha-female attitude where Diamond tends toward introspection, waiting for the moment, at the very least hesitating before she makes it herself. But Diamond’s not as cheesy as Khan either. She sticks to trad R&B diction but doesn’t resign herself to it, playing within it but never with it, grinning but never smirking. Find me an R&B lyric this year better than the first line of “All Woman”: “I came, I saw, I conquered your heart.”

Miss Diamond plays like an hour-long “All Woman,” just different iterations of the same great song. I can’t think of a better compliment, but without getting into the perpetual fight over what a full-length dance LP should or can be, maybe you disagree. Thing is, there is something *comfortably* repetitive to Miss Diamond. This is partly because Fulton has assembled the tracklisting such that one song’s prelude starts before a totally different song whose prelude will come five tracks later, and by the end, the album is a sweaty haze of “I want you” and “I need you” and “I’m waiting for you.”

That’s somewhat unfair though, since Fulton does break things up. Early on he sneaks in a fierce polyrhythmic instrumental called “Until the Sun Goes Down,” with referee whistles and tomtom runs and jittery bells, not unlike the sonic situations Mu would find herself in. We get a bubbling synth line in swung eighths (“Racing Thru Time”) toward the end, and freaked-EQ acid house (“I Need You”), and even a gospel-like stomp in second single “Over,” whose open piano chords hide all the little rhythmic nuances that drive the track, such as the extra bass note right before every measure’s downbeat, or the harpischord counter-rhythms deep in the background. Which seems to be a good place to end a discussion with Fulton: You’ve heard this song before, but something about it, you don’t know what, is better.

[jaxxalude]

Come uppance! One of the best albums of the year.