So there I was, walking down the street with my headphones on my head and a smile on my face. I had just put Little Tingles (www.brotherlovecanal.com), the full-length debut CD by queer Canadian dance group Brother Love Canal into my Walkman and I must have been distracted because I missed the first few seconds of the opening track. But before I knew it, I was singing along to a dance version of a song that I recognized from my youth. Singing along, that is, until I got to the chorus and realized that it was the Neil Diamond song ‘Longfellow Serenade.’ I guess you never really know how well suited a sticky-sweet bubblegum pop song from the 70’s is for a dance remake until you actually hear it for yourself. Kudos to Brother Love Canal for allowing me to rethink a song I had previously dismissed. However, Brother Love Canal deserves to be praised for more than just transforming a Neil Diamond rhinestone into a precious gem. True, the trio (Leslea K, Matthew Lucien and Steve Diguer) does have a way with glossy and glimmering dance numbers such as ‘Hold Tight,’ Matthew’s Sylvester meets Prince vocals on ‘Get Out!’ (the best ‘beat it’ track since Bette Midler sang ‘You’re Moving Out Today’,) ‘I.W.F.’ (which stands for ‘I Wanna Fuck,’ making it the best T.L.A. [three letter acronym] since Liz Phair’s ‘H.W.C’), ‘Forever’, ‘Animal’, and the three bonus tracks, among which is ‘Tiens Bon’ (‘Hold Tight’ en Francais). But Brother Love Canal also benefit from having an electroclash sensibility on songs such as the sexy gay title track, the wavy new wave of ‘Boom Zoom Split’, and the French cheer of ‘Pom-Pom’, which should help to broaden its appeal.

More than ten years, and a couple of club hits, after forming D1 Music, out gay dance artist Peter McLean has released The Music Is So Beautiful (D1 Music), a compilation of his tracks. Early successes such as a heavy-house covers of Roxy Music’s ‘Love Is The Drug’ and Fats Waller’s ‘The Joint Is Jumpin’ are included here and serve as reference points to D1’s early years. The Unity Tribal Mix of ‘Unity’, which features a sample of Queen Latifah’s ‘U.N.I.T.Y.’ opens the disc at a swift pace and the Close Shave Mix of ‘Erotic Moans (lead to) Erotic Zones’ is a reminder of the pleasures of phone sex. The underground vibe of ‘Feel The Vibe’, with vocals by Willie Colon, is seductive and you can practically visualize the bodies twisting and turning to ‘Twist Of Love’. The title track, and the disc’s centerpiece, is a love song to ‘the music itself and the way it can get the listener in a spin’. The Detonation Mix of the explosive ‘U Da Bom’ blasts away for almost nine minutes, while A.J. Boland’s

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Love Buzz Dub of ‘Love Is The Drug’ is a soothing musical narcotic that could become addictive.