Escort - Cocaine Blues

Via ResidentAdvisor:

Escort splashed down hard with 2006's "Starlight," a perfect gloss on circa '82 disco-boogie from its zingy strings to the wormy synth hook. A year later they brought out "All Through the Night," which situated them a couple years later—like the Pointer Sisters doing "Hot Stuff." In between came "Love in Indigo" and "A Bright New Life"—less splashy but still pretty good. Then record silence for three years while the Brooklyn band—at last count some 17 pieces big—worked on a full album. "Cocaine Blues" is its first fruit—a four-minute edit is available free by joining the weareescort.com mailing list, and a 12-inch features a longer version as well as light-fingered remixes from Ewan Pearson and Greg Wilson, just about the two best one-two you could hope for on a project like this.

"Cocaine Blues" loosely remakes Dillinger's 1976 "Cocaine in My Brain," a disco-reggae classic in which the Jamaican deejay croaks gleefully about knives and forks, New York and some guy named Jim who just doesn't get it. It's one of those records I think of as "post-standards"—songs equally known as sample sources as for being covered—and Escort's unhurried disco approach treats it nicely. The remixers are as judicious as you'd imagine. Pearson offers a glossier treatment, with the instruments glowing and glistening more; ditto the vocals, which are filtered just enough to sound robotic. Wilson, mischievously, slowly strips the whole apparatus down to nothing. It's good to have them back.