Ace Vinilo y CD

Review: Ace Records are she-pop experts who have kept a constant stream of high quality offerings from the 1960s coming. Featuring mostly British and American artists the label now widens its net to serve up a pair of high impact tunes from their well-received Ciao Bella! Italian Girl Singers Of The 1960s compilation CD. Brunetta's 'Baluba Shake' has big and cavernous drums, plucked guitar riffs and rollicking great chords next to lung-busting vocals. It's a real dancer. Things get more impassioned on the high speed funk chase that is Rita Pavone's 'Il Geghege.'

Review: Nodding to a seminal piece of music writing which documented the emergent disco phenomenon and inspired a smash hit movie, Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night is an authoritative compilation from the early years of disco. It's been put together with care, swerving obvious or over-played tracks to focus on the kind of powerful, soul-shaking cuts that could have been heard lighting up dance floors in Brooklyn in the mid-70s. There are some legends on board, from Creative Source to Eddie Kendricks, Ecstasy, Passion & Pain to Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes, but whoever's on the credits, these are picks to satisfy the surliest of disco bores as much as those who just love a great, groovy tune.

Review: Paul Weller is perhaps one of the best non-soul musicians to ask to compile a rare soul compilation. Rather than documenting soul music as it proliferated in the 1960s, Ace Records' soul aim was to capture a genre, fashion and style as one man saw it in retrospect, in light of his involvement in the mod revival of the mid 1970s. Weller would later go onto form and front The Jam, but in late 1974, shortly before his involvement in the punk movement, he was about none of that business at all. Punk partly grew on febrile tissues of mod, which was in turn an offshoot of 60s soul; and it is true that we may hear a foetal form of the sound in the brasher cuts on this record, be it Billy Stewart's 'Summertime' or James Carr's 'Pouring Water'. Also clock Brother To Brother's 'In The Bottle', a super-early drum machine blues gem perfect for the house heads.