DESTINY’S CHILD
“Lose My Breath”
I’m a bit surprised at the vehemence this song has inspired over on ILM. I’m not surprised that cosmic twin Dan Perry agrees with me, though — this is some great stuff. To be honest, after Beyonce’s dreary-as-hell album (that failure weighs so much more with me than whatever “Crazy in Love” can do, so rarely and completely has there been a divorce between a lead single and the larger release where it comes from), I had no expectations, and since I’ve never been a dyed-in-the-wool fan to begin with — DC work best for me as random surprise encounters than as reasons to live, I think — I really wasn’t aware that the putative reunion had in fact happened. But it has, and while the mp3 floating around sounds a touch murky at the start, it puts together exactly what I like about so much century-bridging and beyond r’n’b — space, beautiful beautiful space. Somewhere in-between and surrounding the drum march shuffle and the skating-on-top-of-the-mix string synths and of course the voices themselves is the space all of the three major elements either stand apart from or suddenly lose themselves into (check the various solo vocal bits on the third chorus and how they suddenly echo into a nowhere that wasn’t immediately apparently, not to mention the following break). It sounds simultaneously together and apart, not welded and not flying apart either, a different kind of tension.
And as for the charge about lack of melody, like I said over there, it’s no more or less so than something like Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk,” similarly march drum driven. Did a whole lot of people suddenly become Geir H.?