Sandro Cavazza – Enemy

“Sounds good, but let’s keep it below three and a half minutes please.”

Tim: I have a few podcasts on my phone that I’m several months behind on, and so I typically play them at at least 1.2x speed.

Tom: Only 1.2x? I used to listen to podcasts at 1.5 way back, and now basically everything I watch on YouTube is going at 2x.

Tim: Oh, well get you and your speedy brain. Anyway this sounds kind of like that.

Tim: Admittedly, YouTube’s next lower speed option, 0.75x, sounds too slow, but it does feel a little sped up, no?

Tom: See, if you hadn’t mentioned it to me, I would probably have just thought “that’s a bit jaunty”, but you’re right. It’s most noticeable at 1:50: that transition is just a bit too fast.

There is a custom speed option in those settings, incidentally: the quality’s not as good if you do that, but I’ll tell you that at 0.9x it just sounds like a mediocre Ed Sheeran album track. That speed difference perks it up.

Tim: I don’t mind, really, but I do get the feeling that a Universal exec heard a four minute track and said “sounds good, but let’s keep it below three and a half minutes please”. It’s good, though, and I like it.

Tom: There’s a weird genre of YouTube called “nightcore” where someone takes a regular song, speeds it up — without pitch correction, so it sounds higher too — and… well, that’s it. That’s the whole thing. In the same way that televisions in shops have their brightness and colour turned up to maximum to ‘look better’ while people are deciding on them, accelerating a song can make it seem… well, not better, but certainly more interesting, at least for a while. Perhaps that’s what’s happened here.

Tim: The speed does work, as we get through plenty of good stuff in a fairly short amount of time, and it’s got a decent melody, vocal, and all that lot. Nice. Fast, and nice.