Paula Abdul's triumphant return to clubland is a welcome event, after well over a decade of waiting by eager fans. Her new song "Dance Like There's No Tomorrow" (purchase/download) is the leading single from Randy Jackson's album Music Club Vol 1 released on Concord Records, in association with his own label Dream Merchant 21 Entertainment. While the song itself has a melody line as varied as a flat-lining heart patient's EKG, the record is one of those tunes infectious enough to get stuck in your head after enough listens.
Mary Hogan, the A&R remix coordinator for Concord, spared no expense in getting the top-name remixers on board for this single: Paul Oakenfold and Soul Seekerz. Additionally, Trevor Simpson of Energy 92.7 in San Francisco contributed a mix and a dub to the remix package. The clear winner here is the Oakenfold 12" Mix, with beats and a bassline so fierce you'll think you died and gone to heaven. His dub takes things in another more sparkly direction, and a bit faster tempo at 128 BPM. There's even an instrumental for all your "creative" types (that's an inside joke there). While the first verse in Paul Oakenfold's edit follows the original pattern of the song faithfully, he mucked things up a bit in the 12" version by adding an extra 16-count and repeating the first verse, simply to keep things in nice neat 32 count measures, an offense trance producers seem to fall victim to more so than any other genre.
Soul Seekerz keeps their bassline nice and faithful to the album version, with plenty of hi-NRG yet understated euro-groove sensibility. Trevor Simpson's mix takes things on a more electro direction, being a loose collection of bleeps and blips sound effects, with no real music, chords, or keys. If you like the electro genre though, this should be right up your alley.
Being an unconventional smaller record label not focused on the pop market, it's unfortunate Concord Music Group followed the outdated lumbering path of the major labels by not releasing all these mixes commercially. By hoping to use the remixes as a "promotion" tool to plug the full-length Randy Jackson album (which is about as far removed from dance music as you can possibly get) Concord alienated remix fans in the dance community by forcing them to either pay big bucks for a copy of the promo CD on eBay, or obtain the remixes by illegally downloading them from the internet. Twenty or thirty years ago, 12" remixes were in fact seen as a tool to "hook" fans, getting them to buy the album once they heard the single out in the clubs. However these days, it's abundantly clear that the remixes for the single can actually be seen as the main course itself, not just the appetizer as was the case back in the 70s and 80s. One hopes that Concord Records will keep that in mind for any future Paula Abdul projects.
