So this is a song by Foster the People called “Houdini.” It’s a perfectly good song. I wouldn’t call it “great,” but as indie rockers go it’s solid enough: good beat, tuneful, distinctive.
See? Not bad at all, really.
But this is the same song as re-envisioned by Remix Artist Collective:
RAC turn the song into a nu-century riff on early 80s New Wave in a lot of ways – the Tron-like keytar riff omnipresent through the song gives it a harder edge, for example. And the upped tempo of the backing music against the unchanged vocals makes the song more dramatic. I know that judgements about musical quality are so often subjective, but my subjective judgement here is that the remix is quite simply a pure upgrade to the original, a case of a B-grade song becoming an A, and remixes are rarely, to my eye, so unambigiously better than their original material.
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I’d say the song was already pretty New Wave: that drum machine beat is ripped straight from Talking Heads’ “Girlfriend is Better.” The remix version is stronger both for the increased emphasis on the keyboard riff (which is a pretty fantastic one, reminiscent of The Knife’s “Silent Shout” in a good way) and less on the generic drum machine.
I think what impresses me most about the remix is how much better the vocals sound. Most remixes don’t do a whole lot with the vocals, but one of the advantages to having them so heavily auto-tuned is that it’s just a matter of re-tuning them. I think every element of the remix is better: the percussion’s better, the keyboard’s better, the vocals are better. Your judgment is, once again, spot on.
I don’t know. I like the remix, but it loses one of the more interesting elements of the original, which is the melody of the chorus. Instead, the remix grabs the final line of the chorus, which is the least interesting part of it, and uses that as its hook without the more interesting lines leading into it. I think that omission weakens the remix overall.
It’s still arguably better than the original, but I don’t think it’s as unambiguous as it could have been if it retained some element of the opening lines of the chorus.
Without the background vocals from the chorus, I think it loses the hook completely. I can’t get into the remix at all.
I love RAC’s remix of “Houdini,” though I feel like both it and the original do something different for me.
Speaking of remixes better than the original, though, Calvin Harris’ version of “Golden” far outdoes what Mika first did with it.
It’s definitely catchier, the nice synth riff running throughout in the remix combined with the catchiest sections of the vocals, and an overall less muddy sound, more upfront and less washed into the background. I like well done electronic stuff though, so the remix has that going for it as well from my perspective.