Finding the Rhythm

The #1 song on my top 50 dance songs of 2008 is Filo & Peri’s Anthem, a renowned and hugely successful track that worked in large part because of Eric Lumiere singing the brief yet inspiring lyrics.

Lumiere’s MySpace bio has indicated he’s been working withFilo & Peri on additional dance tracks; Lumiere is ordinarily the folksy, rocky, guitar-toting singer/songwriter type. In any event, we knew something would be coming, and it just has.

Shine On is the song, and while I’m not sure it’s as powerful or emotionally-charged as Anthem, it’s no slacker by any means. As was the case with the latter song, the lyric of Shine On is one of inspiration, almost spiritual in nature, that gives it a nice emotional element that I really enjoy in music… As rare as it might be that you hear a song and your head and heart just go someplace, it’s awesome when it happens.

I wish the guys had picked a different name, although it is pulled from a central theme of the lyric. There are probably six other completely different songs in my Traktor library with the name Shine On. Apparently shining and moving forward are popular themes for songs.

I also wish that the remix package I was provided had more variety. One of the things that I liked about Anthem is that each remix treatment was pretty different… Fast trancey to slower progressive, and each one had a slightly different use of the vocal (although some trimmed out too much of it in my view).

The three mixes I have of Shine On are just not very different from each other. They’re all about the same length. They all use the same basic template (in terms of how the vocal is used and arranged). I would label all of them “vocal trance.” There’s just not any variety to them. But perhaps additional mixes are in the works, or perhaps they’re available and I just don’t have them. I hope so.

Be that as it may, the Club Mix (presumably Filo & Peri’s own production work) sounds best to me, and the well-engineered use of breakdowns highlight Lumiere’s vocal nicely, while contributing pretty much entirely to the fact that the song takes you on that emotional journey I mentioned.

It’s great stuff, and I suspect this track will be as big (or at least nearly so) as Anthem was.