Mercury / Universal
1999
The 12" Collection And More
About This Album
Although they are best known as funk band, the Gap Band was successfully marketed to a disco audience during their heyday via 12" remixes of their songs. Most of these versions were confined to the discotheques, but this has been remedied with the release of The 12" Collection and More. This handy volume allows casual Gap Band fans get a new perspective on this group's grasp of the groove by compiling five 12" remixes and throwing in three album-length long versions to flesh the set out. The 12" versions reveal a band that approached the remix of a song as a method of redefining it: "Outstanding" cranks up the percussion to show off the hidden danceable edge to that slow jam, and "Early in the Morning" pushes the interplay between rhythm guitar and bass to the song's forefront and proves that the group's ability to craft complex, hypnotic grooves was just as important to their success as their knack for capitalizing on then-current soul music trends. However, the most impressive of the 12" mixes is "You Dropped a Bomb on Me," which transforms the original tune into a 13-minute epic, complete with new percussion breaks and a lengthy instrumental break featuring war-battle sound effects overdubbed atop the song's churning, synth bass groove.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5 and 6)

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