Cyndi Lauper Album: “Disco Inferno”

In late 1998, "A Night At the Roxbury" was released to theaters, where it quite properly faded away. The soundtrack to that less-than-stellar movie was, however, quite good. Nearly every track was fun, well-produced, and made you want to get up and dance (or at the very least tap your feet to the beat).

One of the tracks on that soundtrack was a new dance cover of "Disco Inferno", this time rendered by the venerable Cyndi Lauper. In recent years, and most exquisitely on her "Sisters of Avalon" album, Cyndi's vocals have shown some massive maturity. Whilst already strong and growing back in the eighties, with such hits as "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time", in the 90's she has really come into her own. However, it *is* necessary to have the proper production to back her up.

This CD single does not provide such production.

The soundtrack version of "Disco Inferno" is short, tight, and simply great. For the CD single (released later in 1999), Soul Solution (the original producers of the soundtrack version) have tinkered around, and dramatically reduced the energy-impact of the song. Their two mixes on the single (club & radio) are good, but not as good as the soundtrack version. Then, we have the remaining four tracks which, unfortunately, aren't very good at all. The structure of the song is totally lost, and most of them end up being very poor 'dubs' (tracks which feature very few vocals).

So, if you are looking to get this Cyndi Lauper track, I recommend the soundtrack to "Night at the Roxbury" over this single. You'll come away much happier.

Just when I thought Donna Summer's "I Will Go With You" was the best club track to come out this year comes Cyndi Lauper with "Disco Inferno". Although this track is headed for TOP 10 on the club chart, it is simply a crime that mainstream radio will not catch onto this song. The first time I listened to it I had tears in my eyes and chills down my spine because it is so good. One listen will show that Cyndi is still a major force to be reckoned with. This track is slammin, period.

"Disco Inferno" is one of Cyndi's best dance track to date. Soul Solution did an outstanding job with this production and Cyndi's voice has never sounded so powerful. It's impossible not to resist to this infectious Hands-in-the-air club anthem. The only bad point of this single is that the Plasmic honey and Boris & Beck mixes aren't really good, way too fast, and don't respect Cyndi's vocal. But there are 4 different mixes from Soul Solution and they all rock.

Yes, I agree that this is one of Cyndi's better performances and that it deserves to chart higher than anything she's put out in the recent past. However, the definitive version of this song appears on the soundtrack for 'Night At The Roxbury', not here on this single. Unfortunately, Cyndi's terrifically original reading of such a standard is illogically lost in too much remix trickery. The Rescue Me Mix and Boris & Beck Roxy Dub reduce her performance to percussive ad-libs seemingly used to mildly pepper their own lackluster remixing abilities. Soul Solution, the original produces of the track, fare much better with their mixes (as they do on most anything they're involved with), but still served the song far better in its original form--which is not included on this single. So, yea, coming from one of her longest and earliest admierers, Cyndi's marvelous; the mixing is not. She obviously deserves better than most of the work on this single. Perhaps the other reviewers were too biased to review this clearly.

Cyndi Lauper is one of the few unique voices left to us in the world. She always adds a little fire, spunk and above all voice to whatever she touches. I was a little disappointed with the remixes though as they tend to be bit... Well, the original version on the "A Night At The Roxbury" soundtrack was better.