Innervisions tends to be pretty easy on the ears. Still, you probably wouldn't expect Âme and Dixon's long-running imprint to share talent with Jive Records, the Clive Davis-affiliated home to the likes of Britney Spears and R. Kelly over the years. But in the summer of 2010, not much more than a year before Jive was folded into RCA Records, Australian-born, LA-based singer-songwriter Ry Cuming released his debut on the label. No word yet on how Cuming hooked up with fellow popular recording artist (albeit of a very different pedigree) Frank Wiedemann, one-half of Âme, but the buzz behind the result had a very specific germination: Dixon closed his Boiler Room mix from earlier this year with "Howling," and one bajillion Soundcloud comments later, we finally get the thing on wax.
"Howling," the kickoff of Wiedemann's new solo project, might be Innervisions' first straight-up pop tune, but it's not exactly a left-turn for these guys: with an unsyncopated thump, pleasingly emotive synth lines and an alone-in-a-room male vocal line, it fits their profile better than you might think at first. Still, much of the track is seductive voice and an acoustic guitar—not really the stuff of Panorama Bar, but perhaps a real treat for your blown eardrums on the long walk home on a cool, clear Sunday night. It may lack Gotye's million-dollar chorus, but imagining this as every third song on the radio doesn't seem like such a stretch (if not a welcome prospect, for the first two hundred plays at least). Âme's remix is how you wish every major-label dance rejiggering went down: Cuming bids farewell to his guitar and has his lament laid over a crowd-pleasingly hefty beat, but Âme keep the Max Martin synths at bay, thankfully refraining from smashing the thing to bits. Closing with "Watched You Run," where static and faint clicks back up Cumings' fragile piano and resigned voice, the EP's got crossover written all over it. Pop-averse techno partisans be damned, we could do a whole lot worse.
Tracklist: Ry / Frank Wiedemann - Howling
01. Howling
02. Howling (Ame Remix)
03. Howling (Radio Version)
04. Watch You Run
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