Homegrove With Amelie Lens, Anna and now Capriati it’s clear what crowd GU is trying to catch. I’ll give this a listen when it’s on Tidal I guess, I’ve yet to finish the mixes of the other two I named.
Despite the fairly sizeable thread, it seems this release was completely forgotten about.
As has been pointed out above, in this day and age there is far less need for mix compilations, so it’s not really surprising.
I have just given it a listen though for the sake of it. TLDR - it’s surprisingly solid.
Can’t lie, my expectations were pretty low. I’ve not heard much of Capriati over the years, and the little I have heard has seemed pretty dull, middle of the road and lacking in identity. This compilation is also pretty middle of the road and generic for the genres on display, and pretty much all sounds like it could, or even should, be from 2015. But with that being said, the two discs are actually relatively engaging and work pretty well, both individually and as a one-two combo; with one major caveat.
That major caveat is that the first half of Disc 1 is a bit of a mess. For the most part mildly jacking, mid-tempo, middling house music, with tracks seemingly thrown together at random with little coherence or flow from one to the next. The most egregious example of this is the use of an old track which I actually really like - John Thomas ‘Working Night’ (Rolando Mix), which Capriati somehow manages to make me get annoyed by because it’s used at such an incongruous place in the set plus it sounds like it’s mixed in on the off-beat. There are a few mistakes in the track selection early on which makes me wonder how they were even given the green-light.
At the half-way point (37min mark), Capriati stops faffing about and gets in to more of a groove. The second half of the disc shifts in to your expected Innervisions-leaning tech-house. It’s generally not really my cup of tea, but I can imagine others enjoying it, and there are a few stand-out moments - especially the one-two of Kyle Starkey in to Kink. Following on from the patchy first-half it does feel like trying to climb a large flight of stairs in a house built on quick-sand, but by the end it has just about managed to make you forget about the early wobbliness.
Now, had you asked me in advance of their releases whose GU Disc 2 techno mix I’ll likely enjoy more out of Amelie Lens and Joseph Capriati, I’d have for sure thought Lens. I have really liked a lot of her sets and prefer her overall style. But her effort was sub-par for her and missing something. This Capriati disc is mostly the kind of 130-something chunky, sometimes glacial, techno which truly could have been from a decade ago. The final track is the only one which seems to give even the faintest of nods to more current trends. Yet despite this, it’s actually an enjoyable, well-structured mix. There’s nothing extraordinary going on, but it keeps its energy going throughout, builds well, and has some pay-off at the end.
While none of this I can imagine being worth paying money for in the streaming age, unlike some other recent GU efforts for the most part I don’t feel like my time has been wasted by giving this a whirl and there is some replay value. One other thing to add which helps, the sound quality and mastering seems very good. Everything sounds really clear and crisp.
