Fantastic Man - Plastic Fantastic (Kolour LTD)

If you're a record fanatic you're more than likely to have heard this latest offering from our friends from Kolour Recordings, which has been topping Juno's sales charts for a few days now. While Kolour's output is always on point they seem to keep the very best stuff for their Kolour LTD offshoot, and this release by Fantastic Man might be their biggest and baddest record yet.

Fantastic Man first surfaced on a sampler Wolf Music put out a while ago, delivering what was arguably the standout track on that release (no mean feat with when you're sharing a record with the likes of OOFT, KRL and Hunee). Inquiring minds wanted to know who this 'Fantastic' figure was, so we started looking and asking around, and guess what? We ended up in Melbourne. Again. As it turns out, Fantastic Man is Mic Newman's disco nom de guerre. I haven't really been following what's been going on in (deep)house land over the past few years, so Mic Newman was a new name for me, but while perusing his rather impressive backcatalogue two things struck me immediately: clever, rolling drums and superdeep grooves.

And it's exactly those things that make the 'Plastic Fantastic' release such a thrilling ride. Groove With You is my favorite of the 4 tunes on offer. A big fat juicy deep midtempo groove, driving drums and some clever loops of Maxwell that work really well. We've been playing this all over the shop, it's irresistable. Fantastic Man ups the tempo a bit on 'Nuthing but a Thang', which is based around a few Erykah Badu samples. And while I'm not the biggest fan of hearing ms Badu's vocals over pounding house drums (I blame the billion deephouse bootlegs in the early 90s), our prodigal Melbournite has chopped up and arranged things so tastefully you'll completely lose yourself in the groove he's conjured up. On the flip, Maxwell makes another cameo appearance on Say What You Said, a gentle midtempo groover that ticks all the right boxes. To wrap things up, Kolour have trown in a solid remix of Groove With You by Andy Ash. It's the original that will keep this record glued firmly to the front of my bag though.



Pick up a copy here. There's only 500 pressed up on pretty yellow vinyl, so make sure to bag this before they're all gone (which will be a matter of days, not weeks). Don't say we didn't warn you....killer stuff all around!