Son of a US airman brought up in territories as wide and contrasting as Turkey and Holland would suggest a man who knows no barriers, sound, cultural, sexual or otherwise, so when adoptive New Yorker, house practitioner and occasional star producer, Armand Van Helden strays into the traditionally hostile territory of ROCK and starts some serious landscaping, you can be pretty sure that it’s going to cover a greater terrain than spandex and leather-trousers. And whilst everyone from Goldfrapp to the Two Lone Swordsmen may be serving up a (deep) dish of glitterballs and riffs, few albums are doing it with the same wilful aggression and camp bombast as the outrageously brash and entertaining ‘Nympho’.
Star of New York’s house clubs with The Witch Doktor, New York Express, Breaknight, Spark Da Meth, The Funk Phenomena and best known for his prodigious remixes for the likes of Deee-Lite, Jimmy Somerville, New Order, Deep Forest, Faithless, and Tori Amos (‘Professional Widow’) Van Helden began beefing up on power chords on last year’s critically well received ‘New York: A Mix Odyssey’, a reconnaissance mission of sorts, bringing to our attention the rich seam of talent garnered from a melting pot of 70s and 80s culture clashing rock and pop anthems. It is then no surprise that mission completed, Van Helden begins drawing up plans for the final push and ‘Nympho’ is arguably just that; a summation of all the voluptuous disco madness, faux eroticism and heavy riffing of master club hits like ‘Hear My Name’ and ‘My My My’, soaked in bucketfuls of distortion and shitfuls of beats, from punky and cowbell thumping title-track, ‘Nympho’, the sleazy and dominatrix ‘Come Play With Me’ to the glam-bamming splendiferousness of ‘When The Lights Go Down’.
It has its turkeys (‘Hot City Nites’, the dreadful, ‘Jenny’) but so do most special events. By most people’s standards, however, ‘Nympho’ is a tremendously consistent and fun album sure to please as many people as it is likely to piss-off. Love him and loathe him both, say I.