It's been a long time since new stuff's come out that is really decent so I'll fire away with some current addictions.
Oh man, D. Ramirez has a gift for electronic music. If you don't remember or know him, you will when you hear this (yes I gave you the instrumental version, if you don't like it you can suck my keyboard. Instrumental music is brilliant, which is a topic for another post). He remixed both these songs into awesomeness - I haven't heard Yeah Yeah's original but my gods did he make Lost so much better. I turned the original of Lost off after 25" because I just couldn't take another generic female vocalist over an upbeat dreamy almost-trancey tune, because that shit gets stale fast. Don't get me wrong, I find some of them decent. For about ten seconds. It sounds too much like September. And September sounds too much like Cascada. And Cascada sounds too much like September. I swear someone pushed Ctrl+C on one and carbon-copied the other with Ctrl+V. But yeah, D. Ramirez is incredible. Look up more of his stuff. A good place to start is his own track, the very cheeky La Discotek. If that's not your thing, hunt down his remix of Junk by Ferry Corsten and Guru.
Which leads me into something a little more obscure.
YES. I had to give you the full version. I posted this on Facebook with a comment to the effect of "Listen to it, love it, buy my book". It's a nice, dreamy-electro-without-being-dreamy-trance track. Ethereal. That's the word. It's not a clone of Robert Miles trying to screw dream-trance fans out of all their money (incidentally, Robert Miles as the pioneer was pretty awesome but the genre went downhill faster than an avalanche on heat) by just putting a few piano soundbites in the middle of an otherwise poorly-made trance beat. It's a song. The lyrics (although somewhat indecipherable) are really nice, especially for a male vocalist. His vocals on this song are the male equivalent of the female singer Kaskade normally collaborates with (whose name I can't recall right now). And Kaskade's stuff makes me melt faster than an avalanche on heat. I owe a lot to Zan Rowe (who, incidentally, doesn't know I exist) for playing this song on Triple J one morning, and waking me up in a good mood. She seems to have a knack for doing that - she woke me up with Street another morning. This morning, however, she gave me this:
I'm kinda disappointed by this song. Not because it's bad, but because of Flight Facilities' (somewhat small, but growing) fanbase. To "liberate" a quote from Yahtzee: unfortunately, Foreign Language is in the uncomfortable position of necessarily having to be compared to Crave You. Crave You exploded and Foreign Language has to live up to that. Having said that, Foreign Language is exactly what I've been craving (excuse the pun) since Crave You came out: another decent throwback to when EDM was actually good: 1977 (when Jean-Michel Jarre released Oxygéne) to 2009 (when David Guetta switched sides). I place Foreign Language somewhere in the late 1980s, maybe early 1990s. Now that EDM is all commercial and shit, the lowest common denominator has been satisfied but music snobs like me aren't. Alright, some of it's good (if about 15 seconds were cut out of Bounce by Calvin Harris and... whoever the hell did the vocals, it would be on this blog). Some of it's good (Swedish House Mafia and Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, for example. Oh, and Example are OK, too). Some of it's fantastic (Aston Shuffle WOOOOO! Bag Raiders WOOOOO! Bloody Beetroots WOOOOO!). But a lot of it is (quoting Bernard Black) tossycock. Bring us back to proper EDM before all this grungy shit came along. You producers were Doing It Right for over thirty years and in the last two and a bit you've killed my faith in EDM ever becoming a hit. Flight Facilities are taking a step in the right direction with both songs. Hell, they're taking a giant leap in the right direction. Hopefully it'll catch on and pretty soon EDM will become the avalanche on heat that my naïve teenaged self predicted some eight years ago.
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