Ferry Corsten’s “We Belong”

Ferry Corsten / We Belong / May 11, 2009
We Belong

There are some genres that are particularly accessible to sampling; it’s not that you can’t do it with every genre (feasibly, you could), just that some genres have really embraced and excelled at the art. Trance is one of them. While the easy way out for any genre of dance music has been to completely cover tracks (the Rock 2 Dance compilation is a good example: what would a bunch of classic rock songs sound as Cascada-esque club hits?), sampling is a skill involving twice as much dexterity and wit. Since trance works in movements, it’s important to build up smoothly to what will become the iconic riff; this was done perfectly in Mike Mikhajin’s “The Reaper,” a sampling of Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” so subtle, yet so obvious once you heard it, that it found the rare medium between was and wasn’t. Not only did it meld in the sample gracefully, it worked within the genre to create a song so niched, it was unmistakeably trance without bowing to the higher power of rock that would make it just another cover.

Ferry Corsten’s “We Belong,” off of January’s Twice in a Blue Moon, attempts something similar, albeit within a much closer neighborhood. Italo disco, while something of an underground genre in the 80s, has probably subconsciously influenced more pop and dance music than first imagined (this has always been one of my favorite genres to sink into, as it will inevitably creep up somewhere later, reaping marvelous trivia spoils, i.e. 2007’s cover of Sabrina Solerno’s “Boys” on He Jie’s Definitely Not an Angel – an obscure Mandarin singer covering an obscure European club hit and with aplomb). “We Belong” pays homage to Fun Fun’s “Happy Station,” a sort of banal song about special people you can meet at the station (erm, the lyrics are italo’s drawback, always), but where Mikhajin flourishes, Corsten, the sort of godson of trance, falls short once again – the same loop is played over and over again with a new melody and set of lyrics; “Quiet witness to forever / in my silence I keep holding on / I am reaching to forever / and I understand where we belong” isn’t exactly poetic, let alone coherent, but it’s not any worse than the original. The radio edit of the song allows just enough time for the loop to be recognizable and not annoying. As with most Corsten tracks, there’s a certain sort of urgency for naught (see “Fire”), but it also serves a specific emotional function, which it executes.

But knowing it comes from some really odd track by two lip-synching models in 1983 makes it all the more fun.

♫ Official Site
♫ Buy We Belong

Friday night Oricon (May 25, 2009)

An every Friday in a while look at the weekly Oricon Top Twenty Singles Chart.

If I were a Morning Musume fan, I might enjoy the banality of “Shouganai Yume Oibito” (#1), but since I’m not, the appears-approved track of the week is Mika Nakashima’s “Over Load” (#8); not because it’s particularly good, but because my diligent observation of the charts for the past six weeks has indicated how poor songs on the chart actually are; to personally rate a song higher than three on a five scale has become cause for joy. Increasingly, I’m becoming sensitive to rating within context: this song is less bad than that other bad song.

Kaela Kimura and her giant sweater-clad back-up dancers spend their second week in the top twenty with BANZAI (#18), a cute, late 90’s rocker grrrl track. THE ALFEE prove they are (barely) still alive! with single Sakura no Mi no Jukusuru Toki (#6); their appearance on May 8’s Music Station was like a sadly unironic aping of The Darkness (I’m referring to the glass-guitar wielding, pink-bell-bottom wearing, auburn-tressed vocalist) that was equal parts disturbing as it was embarassing. w-inds.’s are #2 with Rain Is Fallin’, a combination of pop, 80’s nostalgia, and Hammer time! fashion. JUJU’s low-key piano duet Ashita ga Kurunara is still in the top ten for the third week (and finally growing on me), which includes a cover of “The Rose.” Other covers include Hyde of L’arc~en~ciel’s side project VAMPS attempting Bowie’s “Life on Mars” on EVANESCENT (#4) and Kiyoharu’s “HELLO, I LOVE YOU” on Kurutta Kajitsu (#10) . All covers are, if not terrible, unnecessary.

Mika Nakashima’s single Over Load is the most entertaining of the singles this week, mostly because it’s surprising; from her role in the feature film Nana, to every pedestrian single she has released since 2001, Nakashima has been the shoulder to cry on when insomnia strikes. On her first number one single she says, “I was really surprised at first, but I assumed that that was the way it is, because I really knew nothing at all.” Which says nothing about anything. Just like this single, that I didn’t instantly hate. Again, I’m learning to judge within the system. It’s not easy.

80kidz’s “This Is My Shit”

80kidz / This Is My Shit / April 15, 2009
02. Go Mynci / 07. She / 12. Frankie

The Japan Times Online said that “the haphazard “Fait la Danse,” which sounds like a poor stab at mid-’90s techno, derails the album’s momentum,” but in fact, the momentum of this album is in jeopardy quite earlier; around track three, actually. While “Go Mynci” leads the listener into a slow, balanced composite of the robots you’ll likely find swirling around on This Is My Shit (a poor title for any album released anytime, anywhere), “Flying Buttress” tries slightly too hard please; in a world of Justices and MSTRKRFTs, all (disc) jockeying to be purveyors of nuevo-electro (you first heard that here, by the way), it’s becoming increasingly important to hone the skills already available to you, for where could electro possibly, really, go next? You could stir in some organic instruments, Auto-Tune the shit out of some vocals, and create some sort of elaborate character for your stage show, but even Daft Punk could show you it’s all about the melody; the same one that will repeat over and over again for at least three minutes of what could quickly become aural laceration in the wrong hands.

An uninspired (lazy) deejay could easily push play on 80kidz and let the audience take care of the rest, but the real standout tracks have a good beat but can’t necessarily be danced to and take a serious listen to mine. “She,” a lovely hybrid of melancholy and amour, is clearly the album’s love song and the addition of a haunting piano and guitar loop make the track really pop, particularly when the album takes a breather to let the piano do its MIDI-inspired solo. The following track, “Miss Mars,” is another song with a slower tempo that gains speed as the track hobbles along, repetitive as any child handed a kazoo. “Yellow Rambler” brings a chunky sound to the album that works to the band’s disadvantage; the track “Disdrive (Rework)” attempts the same formula, but the sheer amount of things happening leads the titular melody to get lost somewhere in all the overcompressed noise. Attempts at hip hop (“Frankie”), where instrumentation is kept simple and more low-key, is where 80kidz really flourish, giving the instrumentation ample space to roam.

For a debut album, This Is My Shit shows more than enough stamina in the world of electro, though its seemingly positive (sixteen whole tracks!) is also a negative (sixteen freaking long tracks). The album would probably have worked best if it was a non-stop mix with each track kept at a bearable level for what eventually accumulates as a lot of key-melody repitition; “Getting You Off” is a great song, but at 5:28, it can lose even its most devoted listener. While 80kidz may not have invented anything new in the genre, they’ve certainly show they’re capable of mimicking the best to their advantage.

♫ Official Site
♫ Buy This Is My Shit

From weak to WTF: a triumvirate of bad choreography

On one hand, I understand the need to take music videos to the next level, to stand out, to be different; the music video has always been a kind of odd creation. Is it advertising? Is it art? Nevertheless, it seems PVs have been increasingly less about promoting artists and more about promoting concepts. But moving from Big Personas to Big Ideas has created some really poor choices, among them setting, effects, and choreography. Notable are the following recent promotional videos for Mitsuki Aira’s “BARBiE BARBiE,” MEG’s “SKIN,” and Chihiro Onitsuka’s “X,” which commit the heinous crime of making you remind yourself that not only is the choreography suspect, it was meant to be like that.