Album Review: Round Table Knights – Say What?!
50 minutes of clap your hands and say yeah music! The debut album by Swiss turntablists Round Table Knights is what I would call soul-jazz house music at its best … there’s horns, jazz notes, and plenty of bump. “The album is like when you listen to a Round Table Knights DJ Mix, there are always some songs from different genres that you wouldn’t expect in an average House DJ Mix, we like these little surprising moments of finding out that something you would never expect fits together very well.”
As the 12th century ‘Round Table’ theory suggests, each that sits at it, does so in equal measures. Mixing deep house, Detroit techno, minimal, disco, left-field jazz and hip-hop drops, the duo present a fresh, balanced and eminently listenable take on classic house. Tracks that grabbed our attention include Old Fashioned and Paparussi, with a catchy brassline that transports you to a sweaty club in Nairobi (or perhaps to a club near you 🙂 ) with its hypnotic horns and Santanaesque-Jingo-like samples compelling your body to move. The brass rhythms continue to snake their way through the tracks on this album giving it a nice funky jazz vibe. Cut To The Top features Reverend Beat Man on vocals with a haunting clarinet line that gets wife-approval to be blasted on the stereo at 7 in the morning. Stomper is a true stomp, harkening back to the early days of Chicago four by four house (remember K-YZE’s “Stomp” from 1989?). Why Be Serious, Drop the Dow and Calypso are other notables with the latter a massive hit for the label Made To Play earlier in 2010.
This album is highly recommended and we think is going to stay on your playlist for a while with its fresh take on classic house beats. You can get a copy of Say What?!
Amazon (digital download is cheap at $5.99 here
