This is how you properly move an unrelated music genre onto the strobe-lit dance floor. Only a few producers can make this leap without the result sounding like an offshoot of such club music atrocities as Rednexx’ Cotton Eye Joe cover or any number of crossover country hits that had a lazy 4/4 applied to them by an aspiring Club 69er with a handful of 808 loops and the imagination of a drive-time AOR dj.
Balkan Beatbox does this incredibly well, dragging post-Eastern-bloc music over to the bassbins and plying it with near-Mitsubishi-quality E. The Alabama 3 have been embracing Roland drum machines and various electronic interjections, bringing their country/blues mixture ever closer to the smoke-and-lasers of club culture.
Add the name James Copeland to this incredibly short list of unlikely roots music re-routers. This South African producer traffics in something called “electro-swing,” which is as good a name as anything for this housed-up remix of Hillbilly Moon Explosion’s My Love for Evermore, which itself is a rockabilly torch song featuring some splendid his-and-hers vocals that play off each other, alternating between breathless and guttural.
Copeland’s remix is party in the front, toying with a couple of truncated loops before unleashing the kick drum. After two minutes of pace-setting, Copeland cues a drop, peeling away nearly everything but the original and giving HME a chance to stretch their (almost certainly) black stovepipe jeans a bit (perhaps get a cigarette lit as well) before giving the business end of things the “business” and riding the loops back into the groove.
Altogether an amazing remix, one that sounds like not much else out there. It’s enough to make even the most ardent nu-greaser put away the his or her switchblade and play nice with the club kiddies and their endless assortment of paraphernalia/stuffed animals.
More James Copeland on Soundcloud.
Hillbilly Moon Explosion on My .
/s/CLT
Minor Scratches 