You can’t turn right or left without
bumping into something Booka Shade; live show touring the world, studio album
(believe it or not
Move! is their fourth) and singles with a veritable slew of
on-the-button remixers.
Booka Shade themselves have taken the unusual but shrewd move of
not releasing the album version in the single package but remixing it
themselves and releasing that version. BS have weaved into play a female vocal,
which is actually pretty subtle, fitting nicely and sounding more like something
either reversed or from a chant so it’s never really tangible but
adds to the overall effect of the track. Apart from that Booka Shade are
packing a lot of other layers into Regenerate, a bed of tribal drums with
clever space-echo delays and cool effects underpinning the ever present melody
– often so subtle you don’t really know they're weaving their way into your
subconscious. Yang to the yin of subtle is the big dubstep influenced bass,
the arpeggios, the layers of sub-bass and uplifting pads; it doesn’t sound like
stadium fodder but it is (check the live show).Beautifully produced and thought it this is classic Booka Shade stuff.
Popof turns in a more club-focused remix utilising most of
the elements but keeping it deep and funky by showcasing less of the elements
at once in a killer arrangement that is deceptively effect on the dancefloor, a
master remixer at work. Kris Menace pushes the rave-pump button in a remix that
will take most of the radio attention because it’s the big-room sound of now. A
monster there’s no doubt, with reverb-drenched hooks, rumbling bassline and big
build up followed by hands-in-the-air bit, effective but too obvious. It’s
about here that remix fatigue starts to set in. There are a lot of remixes and
none of them are bad, Luke Mandala takes it darker and focuses on the dub-step
part of the bassline and Pan-Pot drives it forward with a super-clean prog-tech
crossover. Pysh (who we previously reviewed on Tetsuko records) gives us some
of his lush progressive layers.
I’m hoping that enough punters are tenacious
enough to get the excellent Lazersonic & Zak Frost remix, a curious
percussive house with shades of reggae in the bassline and big dub-delays. It’s
like the boys thought what the heck let’s not take this too seriously or we
might not stand out from the crown and bingo, there it is - a rocket ride to
the moon and back rather a bus into town. Superb stuff, but so is the Original
Remix and the Popof remix.
Great package and a great set of remixes, just
rather too many of them in too similar genres.