Make me dance, I want to surrender

Hi all.  After a few restful weeks visiting family for the holidays, going to Mexico to read books in hammocks, and generally recharge my batteries, I’m back and ready to get back posting.  For a while that will probably just mean covering some of the awesome music of 2013 that didn’t quite make my year-end lists.  But even though we’re only a few weeks in to 2014, there’s already some great new music for this year which I’ll touch on.

I Didn’t See it Coming (Richard X Mix) – Belle and Sebastian

For today, we’ve got a remix that was absolutely aching to happen.  When B&S released Write About Love a few years back, I said: “This song so easily could have been an all-time great. The first half is an absolutely perfect set up for a galloping rush in the second half. However, they don’t actually commit the whole way so it ends up being just a bit of a damp squib.”

This remix (from The Third Eye Centre, a collection of b-sides, remixes, and so forth) remedies that problem by turning the whole track into a fine piece of electro-pop.  It still doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could, unfortunately, since making the whole track peppy doesn’t really capitalize on the soft/loud dynamics just waiting to be unleashed here.  But still, it’s a massive improvement over the lukewarm pacing of the original; this version actually delivers on the potential energy in the melody.  Though it does kind of weirdly sound like it’s being played underwater.

Anyways, I still think the definitive version of this song is waiting to be made by some enterprising soul.  But this track is at least a nice proof-of-concept.