Astralwerks / Emd
2003
Presents His X Factor, Vol 1
About This Album
"The best album in the world ever! Massive tunes! All the biggest stars! All the biggest hits!" So proclaims voice-over artist and former BBC DJ Mark Goodier partway through producer/mash-up pioneer Richard X's sprawling spectacle of a debut album. It's a joke -- obviously -- and a decent indication of the cheeky, lighthearted tone with which X constructs his reverently irreverent recombinant electro-pop. But it's not hard to take the suggestion at least a little bit seriously, particularly slotted as it is just before one of the most genuinely "massive" tunes of the early 2000s (in Britain, that is): the Adina Howard/Gary Numan frisson-collision "Freak Like Me," which began its (b**tard) life as a bootleg 7" on X's Black Melody imprint (as "We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends," recorded under the name Girls on Top), before it was re-recorded by the Sugababes and debuted at number one on the U.K. singles chart. (It appears here in the "We Don't Give a Damn Mix," which doesn't differ appreciably from the hit version.) Other legitimate hits include the similarly constructed "Being Nobody," a number three single that combines the Human League's "Being Boiled" with Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody," as resung by pop group Liberty X, and the number eight "Finest Dreams," a collaboration with Kelis which matched the League's "Things That Dreams Are Made Of" with S.O.S. Band
Track List (try tracks 2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13 and 14)

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