"What Would You Like to Hear Again?" feels, simultaneously, like a high-tech hymn for a millenarian utopia and the soundtrack to an 8-bit video game about the Marx Brothers. Fascinatingly, although the EP is an early entry in the gabber subgenre, the music already feels like a parody of itself: a series of hyperbolic, amphetamine-fueled anthems for a world on the brink.

The title song kicks off with a bizarre, repetitive vocal sample layered over a Looney Tunes-ish track that feels both silly and menacing. Hyper, buzzing bee noises compete with the frantic chirping of a smoke detector gone rogue, and the overall effect is that of a robot careening out of control. Things only get more manic from there. The EP is rich with drum machines frantically jockeying toward an imaginary finish line, thumping thuds reverberating across ear-splitting shrieks, classic vocal samples modulated into unfamiliarity, and absurd rhythmic squelching noises that sound like Cowboy Curtis plodding around in waterlogged boots. This is a record that *mogs* its listener.

Despite its forward-looking sonic profile, WWYLTHA feels charmingly DIY — as with all the best techno, you can sense the pulsating human heartbeat at the core of the machine. The mind behind Dyewitness was a young Rotterdam producer by the name of Mischa van der Heiden, and you can almost visualize his fingerprints on this EP. (In one interview, he talks about creating his earliest tracks by recording vinyl records to cassette and then cutting up the tape to create samples, so the fingerprints here may be physical as well as metaphorical!) The cover art looks like it was done by a high school student in the best kind of way (considering that van der Heiden was 21 when WWYLTHA came out, this may actually not be too far off the mark).

Like much European techno from this era, WWYLTHA features prodigious sampling from Black American artists — in this case, Public Enemy and Rhythm Controll — combined with borderline(?) obnoxious Eurotrash beats. Ultimately, Dyewitness feels like the endearing wigger little brother to Eurodance acts like Praga Khan and 2 Unlimited, wearing his influences on his snot-encrusted sleeve. In addition, the combination of DIY sensibility, menacingly upbeat energy, and tongue-in-cheek willful stupidity is reminiscent of what was going on in certain corners of European metal at the time; I'm specifically reminded of Antwerp-based mincecore pioneers Agathocles. I'm not sure if the gabber scene and the grindcore one had any overlap or if they just happened to share an era and approximate location, but as a fan of both it's fun for me to imagine them drinking from the same spiritual and creative well.

According to van der Heiden, the project was named after an "As Seen on TV" self-defense spray. In addition to temporarily blinding a would-be attacker and dying their face green for identification purposes, it would also apparently transform them into Jordy Verrill:

"The Way I Feel" was the second single off of Sweet Vendetta, an air-tight, rock-solid record full of slickly produced, meticulously orchestrated pop songs about how love transcends death and time is fake. As an album, Sweet Vendetta feels like a look into the deepest recesses of a man's soul — a sonic incantation that deals not so much with the exorcising of demons as the creation of angels.

The track kicks off with a guitar solo like a lonely wail. It's a plaintive cry echoing through an urban nighttime world whose denizens exist in close physical proximity but are psychologically isolated:

Every night I sit and cry

Every night I sit and wonder why

Still nobody knows

And when we're living in houses rows and rows

And yet we're so far apart

And it's oh so hard to see a star

This virtuosic, George Benson-esque smooth jazz guitar provides a steady counterbalance to the emotional urgency and wistful repetition of the lyrics. The solo leads into a funky, classic disco bassline and catchy electric piano lick that lets the listener know in no uncertain terms that this song is going to be an absolute banger.

Legendary studio drummer Jeff Porcaro uses rolling toms on the chorus, a bold choice that pans out wonderfully. The driving beat gives the entire track an immense momentum, and one can imagine that on the right night with the right crowd, the idiosyncratic drumming and satisfyingly complex tempo changes on this one absolutely burned up the dancefloor.

For the first two minutes and thirty seconds or so, "The Way I Feel" builds in intensity and promises to be a straightforward uptempo dance tune. Then, during the bridge, the song does something remarkable: it completely drops the beat. "What would you do if it happened to you / Like it happened to me / It keeps on happening to me," Gurvitz muses, simultaneously posing a compelling hypothetical to the listener and implying that his current obsession is just one in a series. A measure of this and the song takes off again, careening into a joyful, classic strings-driven disco segment that soars and glides like Gurvitz's soul is winging its way up to Heaven via Studio 54. This juxtaposition of pensivity and exuberance perfectly conjures the schizophrenic frenzy of emotion — fixation, frustration, and acceptance cycling back into fixation — that is one-sided love.

The B-side for "The Way I Feel," "Drifting Star," features a punchy horn hook and a futuristic-sounding synth layered under an ethereal, flirtatious flute and backed by a solid funk bassline. True to form, Gurvitz's assertive guitar work sounds powerful and tender at the same time. The orchestration and production are lush yet restrained — despite the frothy disco energy, at no point does the track (or any track off of Sweet Vendetta, for that matter) feel like it's excessive or insincere.

Thematically, "Drifting Star" is a cosmic interdimensional cri de coeur, wrapped in the trappings of a pop song:

After this lifetime is over

And forever I'm to be a drifting star

I'm gonna live my life over again

You can't forget who you are

All that was mine I'm still keeping

And my love for you will carry on and on

It's not once that I've cried

It's not once that I'll die

And I know I've got to see you again

I know I gotta see you again

It's a passion that conquers matter, space, time, and death: transcendental, incandescent human emotion, reverberating eternally. The lyrics about the occult power of romantic obsession are made all the more compelling by the fact that they are backed by a toe-tapping, sexy pop tune: the esoteric is balanced by the carnal, the sacred bolstered by the profane.

Oddly, when I think of the woman who could have inspired these songs, I picture somebody quite ordinary. Maybe somebody named Susan, pursuing an undergraduate degree in Education, pretty, blonde hair, blue eyes, pleasant, well-liked, laughs at your jokes. Maybe I'm picturing such an anodyne muse because it feels so much like Gurvitz is projecting a complex inner world onto a less interesting outer one. As is often the case with artistic or romantic fixation, it's what's inside your head that gives the work or the relationship that sense of pathos, drama, and immediacy. Forgive me for indulging in astrology talk, but to me the combination of occult fascination and undying romantic feeling conjure an extremely Cancerian energy.

I can't recommend these sunny, slick pop songs about transcendental longing enough. Gurvitz puts the "mystic" in "optimistic."

Sex Over the Phone represents the Village People's first and only foray into HI-NRG, and was their first real banger of an album since Cruising came out in 1978. To a superfan such as myself, in some ways this doesn't feel like a "real" Village People album; Ray Stephens has a wonderful voice, but foundational singer Victor Willis' presence is missed. (Although it is kind of cool to look at the group's entire career and see various vocalists assuming the "Cop" character's identity, taking up the mantle like a superhero passing the torch. The World Needs a Hot Cop.) However, producer and longtime Village People impresario Jaques Morali always brought a distinctly disco sensibility to his work in the HI-NRG genre, which helps to make Sex Over the Phone feel like a logical part of the Village People's discography.

The title track features a solid, catchy guitar hook layered under retro-futuristic synths and an entrancingly raunchy saxophone lick that is so sleazy as to be just this side of parody. (Think "camera panning up a beautiful woman's legs as she steps out of a car in the horniest film noir in existence" sleazy.) Delightfully, this is all combined with "awooga"-style cartoonish panting noises in the chorus. The song's main character is, quite literally, gagging for it.

Lyrically, “Sex Over the Phone” tells a tale of seemingly insatiable desire for erotic gratification, which is projected onto the invisible fantasy on the other end of the line, and, consequently, directed inward. It is a pre-internet song for the extremely online era: a gooner anthem that anticipates our current moment dominated by simping, parasocial relationships, and solipsistic sexuality practiced in isolation. The music video features the group dancing with the same fantasy woman in different outfits. Each of her costumes mirrors that of the Villager she's interacting with, reinforcing the theme of an inward-gazing, one-sided hookup originating within the confines of one's own skull and culminating at the end of one's own arm.

In the context of the rest of the album, "Sex Over the Phone" plays off of the rest of the tracks perfectly, as most of the songs also deal with a frantic erotic urge ever on the brink of going completely off the rails. Song titles like "Give Me What I Want" and "I Won't Take No for an Answer" let the listener know that this is a record about getting laid by hook or by crook. Even the sole track that isn't about hooking up, "New York City," contains a goofy non-sequitur about "a load in every throat." Comically oversized lust abounds.

Par for the course with the Village People, Sex Over the Phone is all bangers, no ballads. (Side note: I own probably ten records produced by Morali and I'm pretty sure there isn't a single ballad on any of them. As somebody who feels almost unbearably antsy when forced to listen to any song under 100 BPM, can I just say: THANK YOU JACQUES.) Although it's not a disco record, Sex Over the Phone captures that singular Studio 54 energy of horniness that is so overwhelming and urgent that it spills over into panic. All good music features a cycle of tension and relief that is (imo) at its root sexual, and nowhere is this philosophy more nakedly brazen than in disco and its progeny.

The throughline for the Village People's entire discography, after a decade-plus of continual reinvention, is a rambunctious, big-hearted, all-encompassing sexuality. This was tempered a little in their earlier records by Victor Willis' vaguely Christian sensibility, but with Sex Over the Phone it is so palpable as to be just this side of overwhelming. Although I'm listening to this record almost 40 years after it was released, and in a pop landscape that is openly lascivious beyond its makers’ wildest dreams, the manic lust of Sex Over the Phone still intrigues.

As a single, "Sex Over the Phone" peaked at #59 in the UK, and to the best of my knowledge did not chart in the US. The world was not ready.