Finding the Rhythm

One of my favorite new songs received in the past couple of weeks happens to be a remake, and it’s of a song I wish I’d thought to cover, Silent Running, the 80s megahit originally from Mike and the Mechanics.

I always liked the song. The original vocal always had this warmth about it, and it had a nice melody that sorta stuck in your head.

Well, it sorta stuck there again the moment I heard Oliver deVille’s take on it. The Vienna-based deVille is a new name to me. While his MySpace page indicates he’s produced/remixed some big name material, I’m at a loss to find any hard references to anything. Not that it matters; Silent Running is pretty good stuff, and besides… deVille has hair that looks like something on a Second Life avatar, and that’s worth something too, right?

Not surprising considering his Austrian roots, but deVille’s version of Silent Running has a nice, crisp, edgy sound that depending on the mix, is or borders on techno. Germany and Austria seem to be at the epicenter of techno, which has yet to mainstream here in the US for whatever reason, but nonetheless has a huge following here.

Techno remakes like this, and like a lot of those released by CAPP Records, seem to work for a lot of different reasons. For a lot of techno fans, they don’t even know the original song, so as far as they’re concerned, it’s great new music. For those of us who are so used to mellower house sounds we grew-up with, the familiarity with the songs serves as a sort of “bridge” to the hands-up techno sound, which has turned me and a lot of others my age into techno fans. And finally, hands-up techno, as a style of cover, takes a song into new territory that other styles of remake just couldn’t make happen.

I know a lot of DJs and radio programmers have something against cover songs, and I too often find the cover song to be an overused model in the dance music industry. But as I’ve written before, I think the simple truth is that well-produced music and good songwriting matter more than where the song happened to come from. Bad covers of good songs, or good covers of lousy ones, are where things fall apart here, but it’s not a reason to dismiss an entire category, and deVille’s new track is neither a bad cover, nor a bad song to choose for a cover. Check out his MySpace page (link above), give it a listen, and see what you think.