I've gotten through a lot of new releases this year and there's been a load of pap in there, however today I listened to what is comfortably the worst thing I have heard all year.

Step forward Glass Candy with their abomination BEATBOX. It's really gruesome, so achingly now, Italo disco, the ennuied female vocal delivery.... actually I can imagine Spearmint Rhino will love it.

Low point, so low it's a sticky secretion under a primeval swamp, is a stupendously awful cover version of Kraftwerk's Computer Love. It's so bad it's right up there with Nico's cover of The End in the wanting to eat your own hair when you hear it stakes.

It's fucking brilliant. And it came out last year.

Yeah, it's been knocking about for a while but it sounds like you've got something you want to get off your chest about the people who make this music, or more probably the people who like it.

It's alright but not really worth the amount of froth Plan B and NME have devoted to it.

I-love-it,and-mrs.-v-said-it-was-the-shit.

So-we-may-need-another-contender-for-this-title.

Italians Do It Better is a really annoying name for a label. It sounds like one of those stupid bumper stickers.

I'd-rather-have-a-goofy-name-for-a-label-with-dope-music-instead-of-the-reversa.

And-it's-an-80s-bumper-sticker,which-only-enhances-what-they-are-going-for.

Thing is, they've been completely mis-sold by the publications Carcass mentions. They (and the Chromatics much more so) are dream-disco in the way early Saint Etienne were dream-pop/dream-house, really. You could only dance to about half of Glass Candy's stuff, but it's pretty much all great. It's two former rock kids making disco music, and they get it beautifully wrong as only people in love with distant ideas of pop can.

Didn't know it was actually one of those stickers, JV. Guess it came after most of the other ones were popular, as the definitive answer?

As for the shirt, guess there's a reason I never heard of it before.

It sounds pretty bad dalliance. Intriguingly bad in fact.

Incidently, I've unearthed some old original Italo Disco homemade cassettes circa mid-80s, they're good for a few listens but the stuff is clearly not timeless. Den Harrow, Ken Laszlo,...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcS8gyZihhs

You-obviously-never-have-been-to-Seaside-Heights,
Inca.

Do keep up, linus: Why Italo Disco Doesn't Exist, and Why IDIB Records Aren't Particularly About "Italo": part one and part two.

It's not that Italo Disco doesn't exist, it's that the term is ascribed to too many distinct genres, mostly by people who have read (or written) some stuff about it but haven't experienced the music when it first came out, so we're talking about different interpretations here.

Mine refers to the disco-ish pop music that ruled most discotheques in summer resorts across western and southern Europe, places like Juan-les-Pins or Rimini. I believe that is the best fit for the term, because during that era and within that genre Italy was one of the main poles. It was a golden age of sorts for Italian pop, I can't think of any other period where Italian pop artists did so well beyond their borders (other than parts of the Cono Sur, where Italian pop has always been huge).

That genre was definitely not confined to Italy (Magazine 60 in the clip above above is French), it was very much a transcontinental seamless sound. Acts like Baltimora, Ken Laszlo, Kazino and Den Harrow dominated the playlists in the mid-80s. The genre also includes acts like Murray Head (UK) and Trans-X (Quebec) however Italy had the largest slice of that market by a wide margin, so if you're going to invent the term of Italo Disco, this would definitely be the best fit for it by a wide margin. Earlier on, Moroder was a huge figure in mid to late 70s disco, but Italy was a fairly peripheral player within the European disco scene.

Here are four anthems from that scene:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2kkgg_kazino-around-my-dream_music
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/baltimora/video/x10jej_baltimoratarzan-boy_music
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/ken%2Blaszlo/video/x410j2_ken-laszlo-hey-hey-guy-1984_music
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/magazine%2B60/video/xc87b_magazine-60-don-quichotte_music

It's all a bit cheezy, to be sure, but it was also quite good in its own way and it did fit the zeitgeist quite well. Though it was often excellent, the darker less poppy stuff was fairly marginal in Southern Europe.