Paul Nice/ Eric & The Vikings

Paul Nice : Poised, yet remaining louche.

Slack slack slack. Despite my best efforts to post up here every 10 days, this simply isn't good enough. Rest assured that will change, after my suprisingly beautiful wife gave me my birthday present yesterday of 32 hand wrapped killer funk 45's.

So, thankyou for your patience. As a small token of my guilt, please accept a double helping, basically linked by some crashing funk, hard-as-nails drums, and skittering piano.

An under-rated master, Paul Nice has been serving up remixes and break albums for several years from NYC, underpinning tracks by Rasco, Mobb Depp, and many many others.

It's very difficult to pick one - his recent mixtapes (Soul On The Grill, Breaks For Days and Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie) index a man who sucks up good music and turns out diamonds. His Fingers of Death battle breaks series are an essential, his remixes of Greyboy, Nightmares on Wax and the Beasties' "Hey Ladies" need snapping up...I could go on.

So let's get down to brass tacks. His excellent reworking of Jay Z on the unofficial Black Album, including the ludicrously good adoption of Billy Joel's Stiletto break for 99 days. Just when you thought you never want to hear that track again (as I did last summer), and suddenly you hear this essential take.

Eric & The Vikings recorded for Motown in the 70's, and were led by the sublimely named Eryke McClinton. Their million-selling "Vibrations Made Us Fall in Love" may well have taken the charts by storm, but for our purposes, the flipside, a mean, loaded instrumental is the stuff of champions, and is also one of the finest names for a song, ever.. They're still gigging and recording today, track 'em down if you can. Cheers to Greg Belson and Daddy Vegas for the original heads-up.

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Paul Nice's Website
Buy Paul Nice at Fat City Records