Give it to me hot!

I was listening to Gomma’s Anti NY compilation the other day, and was blown away by the contribution of the wonderfully named Sexual Harrassment (sic). “If I Gave You a Party” is an exuberant romp, rather out of place on a side otherwise composed of moody downtown malaise from the likes of Gray and Ike Yard (who have both been ably rescued from obscurity in the last few years). I felt almost incensed that this jam wasn’t the centerpiece, but with uncanny timing, a Sexual Harrassment revival is now underway thanks to a release last week by the folks at Citinite records.

The group, from Cleveland, made only a handful of tracks, in the early 1980s. These fell in the cracks between electro and funk, and were grounded by a brash punk minimalism; as headman Lynn Tolliver remarks of the making of 1982 hit “I Need a Freak”: “But you know, great musicians generally do more than is necessary, so I said to the keyboard player, just give me a thrusting bottom key note, over and over.”

“If I Gave You a Party” is one of those songs that makes you wish you were a DJ so that you could hear tracks like this at actual parties. A lost world of sexed-out minimal synths colliding with Implog-style no-wave noise excursions, it’s a sweatier and sillier cousin of the “cold wave” sounds being produced by some repressed but remarkably dressed Belgians around the same time. (Hopefully someone starts calling this “heat wave” and starts throwing themed parties on the Lower East Side.)

The remix/covers EP, Give It To Me Hot, is timely, given the global resurgence of interest in electro and synth-funk recently, and it’s only appropriate that DāM-FunK, LA’s Baron of Boogie, heads things off with a trademarked astral-analog reworking of “You Are My Sexual Connection.” But the rest of the EP follows much less naturally from the original material, which is actually quite welcome. Soweto-based Sweat.X’s version of “I Need a Freak” is frankly terrifying, turning the original’s neon campiness on its head, creating an uneasy landscape of latent violence. Jimmy Edgar and G. Rizo’s reclamation of the throwaway Richard Simmons-baiting “Exercise Your Ass Off” might be the album’s most impressive effort. Finally, Robert O’Dell’s “If I Gave You a Party” refuses, understandably, to coast easily on the epic hook of the original. But his hodgepodge, schizoid cover, while at times compelling, is ultimately too busy and overworked. Like Sweat.X, he emphasizes the darkness of the original’s flagrant deviance, but ruins a perfectly good party in the process.