Dubfire - I Feel Speed

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  • Dubfire's cover of Love and Rockets’ 'I Feel Speed' references pretty much everything that is wrong with dance music. Throwing all of the genre’s aesthetic clichés into a blender and dishing the results out over a needlessly prolonged eight-minute running time, ‘I Feel Speed’ is the sort of thing I can imagine Satan plays to torture club kids in hell. I'm sure that after the millionth spin on Beelzebub’s decks, the track could potentially start to sound downright catchy…but that's a totally improbable scenario. Here in the mortal world, it’s simply grounds for walking out of a club. That being said, the remixes don’t fare much better. Matthew Dear listed as remixer raises a glimmer of hope, but, as the old adage goes, you can’t polish a turd, and it holds true as ever in this instance. Sure, it’s a far more listenable track in comparison to the original (you can credit that to Dear’s treatment of those atrocious vocals, chopping them down into truncated slices and then looping them atop each other to hypnotic effect), but in the end, it just becomes repetitive and—quite frankly—boring, as he repeats the same trick over and over for a full nine minutes. Booka Shade, meanwhile, manage only to meet expectations which have been lowered by a string of underwhelming releases since last year’s DJ Kicks mix. The Booka boys strip back the original’s sheer sonic excess, only to replace Dubfire’s squelching analog synth riffs and arena-ready drums with tedious effects processing and a wandering interlude that destroys the track’s flow. Alas, thanks to the high profiles of the artists involved, these tracks have been getting heavy play based on name recognition alone. This is unfortunate considering the sheer mediocrity of the material. Dubfire fans will simply sweep this release under the rug and wait patiently for his next tightly machined slab of minimal techno to drop, while his detractors will no doubt see this as yet another opportunity to call Mr. Shirazinia’s minimal credentials into question. Whichever way you spin it, it’s just bad music.
  • Tracklist
      A I Feel Speed (Audion Remix) B I Feel Speed (Booka Shade Remix)
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