preening club kids with a taste for soul, sampling and expressing themselves do not a revolution make, even if their disparate points of origin hold delicious possibilities for a funky global village.
World Clique finds something to love about the Sixties (hippie good vibes, daisies), the Seventies (Sly Stone's message soul, Parliament-Funkadelic's very existence, sexual abandon on the disco floor) and the Eighties (undeniable house music), and the group squeezes it all onto the database. But it prints out poorly, this stuff coming off as a selective history of pop culture played as house music and compressed into easily swallowable three-minute bites. Only the presence of the incomparable Bootsy Collins and the Horny Horns' sexy tooting on "Groove Is in the Heart" and "Smile On" pull Deee-Lite beyond formulaic well-chosen beats and not-quite-powerful vocals. Should the threesome open a boutique, on the other hand, we'll be first in line. (RS 590)
ARION BERGER