Valerie Dore, "It's So Easy" (1985)

One of the albums I spun at the start of the year but never got around to blogging about, because of Blackout 2006-7, was Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance. She caught the attention of quite a few bloggers, of course, and I only just noticed that Correlated Noise even emerged from his hiatus to blurb her, and more relevantly, to compare her to Valerie Dore. Which: exactly.

The charm of Valerie and Sally (or even yesterday's star, Tracey) lies not in the power or even quality of their voices; it's in fact a bit funny to read the wiki entry on Dore, which ends: "She is said to have the best voice in the italo disco genre." Sure. "Said to have." By whom, we don't know. What I like about her is in fact how thin her voice is; on "It's So Easy," it frequently sounds like she strains to hit her notes, and that, combined with the big booming-ness of the Italo beat, gives the song that kind of contrast I live for. I don't know enough about the history of Italo to be able to pinpoint exactly when this particular trend -- wispy female voice over the pounding beat -- emerged (plus, it's Friday afternoon and my mind has shut down), but I'm glad it did. Aside from Dore, the other famous highlight of the genre is Desireless's "Voyage Voyage," from 1986; that's also the track that Pet Shop Boys admitted they were trying in many ways to emulate when they wrote and produced "I'm Not Scared" for Patsy Kensit. They don't say it, but they could have concluded that sentence thus: "...because, seriously, folks, her reedy voice is an asset only with this kind of production. Our story will be that we want her to sound overpowered."