I've heard Heartbeat referred to as "nü-disco." I don't know what that is, but it sounds awfully cheesy, as most "nü"-anything does. To me, Heartbeat is just dance music through and through. I guess the title-track is a bit cheesy, but that's as much as I can churn from this EP, especially with my apparent lack of familiarity with disco.
Labels are trivial, though. Regardless of what one wants to call Heartbeat, it sounds good, and that's all that matters. The breezy tune "Gold Soundz" (featuring Harry Bennett and Heather D'Angelo) captures the relaxed spirit of drifting down the highway in an open-top car, in no hurry to get anywhere in particular as the song languidly stretches nearly eight minutes in length. The sky is blue, and D'Angelo's melon-sweet voice shines through the few thin, transparent clouds like rays of light. If the Chemical Brothers' "The Sunshine Underground" downshifted a few gears and jettisoned most of its busy, tunneling electronics, it may follow an even more similar route as "Gold Soundz."
The latter two-thirds of Heartbeat comprises of Wolf and Lamb's remix of "Gates of Dawn" (which again features Heather D'Angelo), an almost equally long Burning Man mix of "Gates of Dawn" and finally, the original version of "Gates." Yes, that's a lot of versions of one song on a five-track release, and the Burning Man mix doesn't differ much from the Wolf and Lamb version, but the original thumps more steadily, like day shifting into night from one version to the other (or night shifting into day, since the Wolf and Lamb version is the sunnier remix). Jazzy one-two cymbal hits and a higher BPI pick up the tempo and add extra groove to the more nocturnal original. Low, muffled post-dubstep piano chords pulsate in the same one-two pattern and fade into the night as the song drives on and electronics bubble and pop - swirl like the tails of a poi performance.
While closing Heartbeat with the original version of "Gates of Dawn" may seem like an odd choice (usually, remixes come last), Night Plane's sequencing actually makes sense: each version progressively picks up speed and incorporates more effects, eventually culminating in a nearly twenty-minute track with minimally varying motifs spread throughout. Running so many generally similar versions of the same song (in sound and in length) together can grow dull quickly, but "Gates of Dawn," no matter whose interpretation, and "Gold Soundz" are both so relaxing that I'm totally fine just drifting along until the road ends.
No comments:
Post a Comment