Taken on its own Warren’s Jam is a great slice of high speed EDM built on fast and funky breaks, rapped vocals pushed back into the mix, emotive electronic washes but mainly pure energy. Play through the whole of Swimming Pool, the album that it is found on, and you will see it in a slightly different context. The album that it sits on is a beguiling mash up of clubland sounds, rave euphoria, trance sonics, left field EDM, urban vocal styles and crazy remixes. It’s mad, unexpected, utterly original and brilliant. Warren’s Jam is just one direction that the album pushes in, there are plenty to chose from.
If you can draw a line between I Feel Love, the song that saw disco spawn house music, and Strings of Life, the tune that saw the birth of techno, then this is music that decided to take a more charged and madcap root. This is music that stole the fastest car it could find and drove it high as a kite, joyriding out of control around the streets and not caring if it got caught. This is music which is all about the thrill of the moment rather than the long game. Music which packs in so much energy and excitement that it could self destruct in a blaze of sonic glory at any moment.
Its a song that exists in both the past and present, it echoes with the ghost of European house pioneers and Detroit clubland explorers but in that cyclical way that music loops through time, it also feels right for the here and now and maybe even marks the start of a nostalgia-tinged new take on those sounds and a new scene for the future. If you are tired of the chill-out vibe creeping over the dance floors of the western world and the way that urban music seems to have chosen conformity and fashion rather than driving new technology, new ideas, new sounds and new musical fusions, then this is definitely for you.
