Tim: Yes, Darude, of Sandstorm and Feel The Beat megafame, back with a new tune. He had a few more recent hits in his native Finland back around 2007, but now this is getting a multinational push, presumably hoping for the same level of success.
Tom: I question whether that’s a “new” tune.
Tim: First for me, a wondering: for someone whose two biggest hits have had either no vocal at all or just a single line, the amount of vocals seems a bit weird. There’s next to no focus at all on the dance bit, despite the multiple builds up to an a cappella “beautiful alien” that almost yearns to be followed by a good thirty seconds or so of massive dance stuff.
Tom: I suppose that’s a side effect of Avicii and his farm-house style: you’re expected to have Big Vocals now.
Tim: Admittedly it’s nowhere short on big beats, but the vocal focus seems surprising. Second, a complaint of sorts: all the Darude-sounding stuff that we enjoyed fifteen years ago is there, but nearly almost entirely recycled. The part beneath the intro is identical to Sandstorm, as the the underlying part that surrounds the two minute mark.
Tom: Yep, agreed: this is the same thing Sash tried with Encore Une Fois: add a new vocal, keep some of the instrumentation, see if people will buy it. It’ll probably do about as well.
Tim: I suppose the argument might be that he wants to keep a similar sound but bring it up to date, which is technically correct, but ideally it’d be by combining two, rather than having half identical and half largely unlike the previous, almost more or a mashup of two tracks than a whole new one. I don’t know, I quite like it; it’s just not remotely what I wanted a Darude comeback track to be.