Deadmau5 ft. Kaskade – I Remember
Canadian producer stealths his way up the UK top 40…
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[7.11]
Renato Pagnani: There’s no forward progression here, only déjà-vu. This works when the synths connect; when the loop permeates your soul; when the beat propels. These things happen on “I Remember.” The flipside is that when these things don’t happen, about forty-five seconds is all you need to hear everything on a Deadmau5 track. “I Remember” suffers from this too; it’s just lucky that those forty-five seconds are more than adequate. I probably shouldn’t like this as much as I do, but Deadmau5 and Kaskade favour subtlety over brute force, which is my biggest issue with a lot of this kind of dance music.
[7]
Frank Kogan: Beats are generic droplets of echoey beauty, singer whispers her way to standard-issue integrity and mystery, and I’ll have to call on the Boney Joan Rule to justify my tolerating her even though I’d bared my teeth at the Bat For Lashes woman.
[6]
Ulrik Nørgaard: I’m having trouble justifying why I like this cheesy, trancy business. It could be because Deadmau5’s production lends it an appealing, contemporary disco-stomp; then again, it might very well be because it sounds like a late 90s Pete Tong Ibeefa compilation I bought when I was young, and that it reminds me of ‘havin’ it large’. Oh dear.
[7]
David Raposa: Two DJs with godawful names stick the most banal spoon/june coming-up nonsense into the mouth of your run-of-the-mill anonymous downtempo disco diva, and buttress it with a gently strobing backbeat that’s so lush and gorgeous that Pretty Miss Thing could be reading from GG Allin’s memoirs for all I care, becuase I think this thing’s actually made me achieve a pill-free peak. If someone can hook me up with a 72-hour megamix of this track, I will sign over my next 20 paychecks to you. Maybe.
[10]
Dave Moore: Ethereal lite house track on 100% auto-pilot — I think even the vocals are demo presets. I can feel myself yawning and checking my watch at whatever not-my-scene venue is playing this long past the time I actually want to be out, but in fairness I’d probably stick around to the end.
[5]
Rodney J. Greene: Like “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” or “Heartbeat”, but so invested in low-key sexy throbbing that they mistakenly decide a big hook would be over the line.
[6]
Martin Skidmore: Very restrained deep trancey house backs an equally restrained, breathy, wistful female vocal. It has a captivating, very-late-night mood, and I’m surprised how gripping I find it, given that it is quite simple and slow-medium in pace. Excellent.
[8]
Ian Mathers: Pretty if a tad generic, this is mostly worthwhile for the subtly professional way our producers mesh up the slowly building backing track with the vocals. The original is ten minutes long or so, and I have no idea if it all goes as smoothly as this, but over the course of four “I Remember” is compelling and even lovely; although like a lot of this kind of music it seems like it’s more suited for the house than the club.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Barely there at all, but what you can hear is beguiling.
[8]
It’s too bad this is going to kick Fight Like Apes out of the top ten, because it’s not as good.
The singer here is Haley Gibb, not Kaskade, who co-produced this.
This kicking FLA out of the top 10 = replacing dead wood with a marginally better quality of dead wood. I love ‘Faxing Berlin’ to death but apart from that Deadmau5 just hasn’t seemed an interesting producer to me.