Kitty-Cuts is the club music subsidiary of the celebrated German label Kitty-Yo, a company that has been responsible for some of the strangest and most wonderful music to emerge from Berlin's notoriously strange and wonderful dance music scene. Kitty-Cuts was established in 2005 and promptly began releasing vinyl 12" records for DJ use, and this disc compiles those along with some remixes and rare cuts, all made available on CD here for the first time. The program gets off to an enjoyable but not exactly earth-shaking start before suddenly blooming into brilliantly funky life with a Richard Davis remix of
Raz Ohara's "Hymn"; things stay at a pretty consistently high level for the rest of the album, with especially noteworthy tracks coming from
Jahcoozi (on the all-too-brief "JahC/DC") and
Gold Chains and Sue Cie, whose "Crowd Control" is given a brilliant reggaeton treatment by
Phon.O. The album's finest moment comes right near the end, though, when
Modeselektor grabs hold of
Jahcoozi's "Black Barbie" and shakes it like a rat, turning it into a spectacular electro-dancehall-funk extravaganza complete with utterly wrecked vocals. Very, very nice. ~ Rick Anderson