A nasty/under appreciated gem from David Bowie's Berlin period, "Beauty and The Beast" is sheer perfection/pure malice in musical form. Ominous squibs of sound coalesce around an almost crocodilian groove and Robert Fripp's hissing, poisonous guitar line. Then Bowie makes one his most memorable vocal entrances with a sound somewhere between a croon and a scream. Things just get nastier from there - David playing the hipster, killer android on the lead vocal, while the backgrounds get all down and dirty on chorus. Then, as if he's suddenly come his senses after committing some atrocious act, Bowie howls over the break: "I want you to believe me!/I wanted to be good!/I wanted no distractions!/Like every good boy should!" - before sliding back into the sociopathic sleekness of the last verse. The genius of the tune is that it suggests all manner of violence/bad shit without actually describing any act of mayhem. Therefore the imagination runs riot. A brilliant/evil track.

A fascinating out-take from the "Diamond Dogs" sessions, �Dodo� can be seen as the starting point of Lady Stardust�s shift from glitter space-boy to paranoid, plastic soul stylist. Like almost everything on D. Dogs, the lyrics are inspired by Orwell�s �1984�, but the music seems to be profoundly damaged by sleek, eerie production style of Willie Mitchell.
Thus the song plays like Al Green in Hell, w/a great groove and deeply creepy feel. The Thin White Duke starts here.

Full of attitude, sleek, punkish-electro.

Julian Cope was a leader in the post-punk band Teardrop Explodes . This tune is from his finest solo album :Peggy Suicide. The production is very sleek and crystal clear .
The mood of this song is somewhat a mix of mystic and playful-its theatrical and druggy.Its pretty much dragging along in the same tempo from beginning to end , but it never gets close to boring.

A superbly catchy mood music piece, with a gentle bossa rhythm and Claus Ogerman-arranged strings. Very cool, and from the same album which featured strongly on the superb 'Snowflakes' CD compilation of the best mood music from the German MPS label. This track arrived in my head after I woke up this morning and demanded to be played. Very sleek and cool.

The b-side of The Banshees' great/very successful cover of "Dear Prudence", and a great example of the band's perverse ability to generate b-sides on the odd afternoon off that where not only better than most bands' A-sides, but often better than most of the proper tracks from the Banshees' albums. (Thus, I can't recommend the "Downside Up" box set of the group's non-LP tracks highly enough.) This song is sleek, groovy, evil, paranoid funk, with Siouxsie at her most alluring/menacing. Tricky covered the song, thus acknowledging the impact of The Banshees on the Bristol trip-hop crew.