Four Tet: "Love Cry"

While the Four Tet/Burial collaboration Moth/Wolf Cub garnered a ton of (justified) acclaim last year, Kieran Hebden’s best track in a long while flew largely under the radar. Released as the lead single from the upcoming LP There Is Love in You, “Love Cry” seethes with tenseness and emotion for what feels like nine short minutes. Hebden layers the trembling pitches and muted consonants of a female vocalist in unpredictable combinations of plaintive laments (“love cry”) and emphatic commands (“love me”). Droning bells toll over tape hiss as if from some long-fallen church tower. The rhythm section, a twangy bass groove and lurching, robotically sloppy percussion, is compelling enough that Hebden could have released it as a standalone track. Finally, an ornate acoustic guitar outro foreshadows something amazing for whatever follows “Love Cry” on the new record.

A remix single released three weeks after the original 12” provides a platform for a couple up-and-coming DJs, Joy Orbison (Peter O’Grady) and Roska (Wayne Goodlitt). O’Grady uses a similar palette of sounds and keeps the note durations intact; a syncopated midrange synth passage drives the track forward and mirrors the original bass line in rhythm and pitch, albeit a few octaves up. He also locks both the drums and vocals onto the beat, in stark contrast to Hebden’s stumbling percussion and irregular vocal snippets. This more metronomic approach feels cleaner, almost more professional, but it comes at the expense of mood and spontaneity. When Goodlitt uses the “love me” line—no crying in his version—it rings at the front of the mix, but unfortunately the vocals don’t get much time in the spotlight. Instead, the main focus is an orderly, practical beat that feels more than a bit staid compared to the original. While Hebden’s bass line stays on the same pitch for measures at a time as chaos swirls round, Goodlitt gives his low hook a cloying half-step jump, a stale accompaniment to the tacky “Roska!” shoutouts that litter the track.

It would be going overboard to say that the Joy Orbison and Roska backing tracks suck the life out of “Love Cry”—the haunting vocals, the key to the track, are used effectively (if unimaginatively) in each mix. There wouldn’t much for a DJ to work with if he or she had to keep both the singing and the ramshackle percussion. But in making the track more rhythmically rigid without jacking up the tension elsewhere, O’Grady and Goodlitt fundamentally altered the mood of the brooding original to less than compelling effect. Their versions might be more danceable, but they are also more routine.