Indie dance music is currently taking a really enjoyable turn back to the pop sounds of yesteryear. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed so much electronic music consistently since the Ed Banger summer of 2006, but rather than ramping up the distortion, the new school’s approach is to showcase the vocals and make sure the accompanying production is absolutely top notch. Enter New Look, a married couple and writing team from New York who popped up on my radar alongside Ifan Dafydd in the Jamie xx’s Essential Mix for Radio 1, otherwise known around these parts as The Gift That Just Keeps On Giving. It came a bit out of left field (though nothing is that strange for a twenty-something whose ears never seem to stop searching) – all heartfelt vocals and Chicago house bass in a mix that concentrated on the post-dubstep canon. To make matters worse, it took me days of timestamp and tracklist combing to actually track the thing down. But now it’s on high rotation and it ain’t going nowhere. People talk about audio sex all the time, I see it on press releases from ambitious hacks nearly every day. But ladies and gents, I think we just found it.
Like Dafydd, who chopped and screwed Amy Winehouse’s ‘You Know That I’m No Good’ within an inch of its life, ‘Janet’s vocals belong to another great pop singer currently undergoing somewhat of a revival. The clue, of course, is in the title, but rather than mess with the formula, New Look preserve the skin and bones of Janet Jackson’s ‘He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive’ perfectly and then set about replacing the internal organs. Where the original fell into step with the ’80s industrial disco zeitgeiest, New Look take the most important aspect of the entire song – the bass – and give it serious legs. No longer warm and real, it bounces along with dominance and is becomes the template for what has suddenly become a minimalist piece of deep house perfection. All the other parts slot in around like the pieces of Bjork’s robotic skeleton in ‘All Is Full Of Love’, completely unobstrusive yet paramount in making the thing work.
The effect of removing all the excess sound – which would have cost Jackson a small fortune in studio time, mind – actually enhances the vocal experience and makes it intensely visceral. With barely any drums save for some two and four midi snares, you’re being captured by the rawest of elements, updated and repackaged for 2011. The fact that it can be sustained over nearly seven minutes highlights how devastatingly good Janet’s vocal performance remains, but the work of New Look should not be ignored either. Their clever synth and bass crescendoes in the Bridge of this song are far and away some of the best sounds I’ve heard from the scene all year, and they build drama without ever diminishing the focus of the song. It’s all thoroughly addictive and something you will probably want to play to everyone you know. I should know, by the time you’ve finished reading this, I’ve just had a head start.
New Look – ‘Janet’
Get more of the look here.
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