5. Messiah – I Feel Love
After four tracks which could reasonably be labelled as ‘pop’, Rave ’92 finally starts the transition into hardcore proper. With a very familiar song reworked in the style of the times, Messiah proved it was possible to make the sickest horse win the Grand National if you flogged it hard enough with an Atari 1040ST.
Placing this track straight after Bizarre Inc’s string-heavy warbling seems logical from a mixing point of view (the opening bars sound extremely similar). However as a youngster I resented Messiah for signifying that the previous track (my beloved ‘I’m Gonna Get You’) had finished. Precious Wilson’s thunderclap bellowing of “I FEE-HEEEL LUR-HUR-URRVE!” was just too much for me to handle, and I’m sad to say I usually fast-forwarded the tape straight to the next track. I didn’t even register the song as a cover version, I just knew it wasn’t my cup of tea. But as my tastes grew heavier over the new few years (possibly thanks to a teenaged jump onto the grunge bandwagon) I grew to appreciate that initial explosion of vocal energy: a fitting announcement of Messiah’s arrival on the stereo, taking no prisoners.
The recipe for a good bosh cover version is a simple formula really – keep the best bits of the original whilst leaving out the dull bits; add a variety of squelchy/buzzing noises, ridiculous vocal samples and a pounding bass drum. Messiah deliver on all counts, out-Morodering Moroder with a great oscillating acid bass and angelic harp plucks – a perfect soundtrack against which to mime raindrops by wiggling your fingers. The section just before the chorus is one of the best build-ups on the entire compilation: gothic orchestral whirlwinds uprooting your house and carrying it off to the land of Oz! Power, momentum and perfect timing – for me this is the definitive version of ‘I Feel Love’.
I couldn’t find the original 7″ mix on Youtube, only the inferior handbag version. So I created a ‘video’ to accompany the song and uploaded it myself.
Good work on the video! ;)
I think what’s happening here tho is a hardening up of the original’s softcore sensation. Not that this version is particularly hard or even much faster than the original but it’s definitely less sexy imo, and that is a bad thing!
So I wasn’t enamoured with this at the time plus they’d started off with a much heavier, hardcore Beltram/Mentasm-inspired sound in ‘20,000 Hardcore Members’ and ‘There Is No Law’ which I liked. The latter features a sample of ‘Purple Haze’ but the voice sounds too feminine to be Hendrix, surely not just a rip out and pitch up job on the original? I heard the Manix remix of ‘Temple Of Dreams’ before the version that charted so am biased but much prefer the turbo-charged e-guzzling former there too.
geeks wanna know: what d’ya make the video with?
much as i like this track, it lives in the shadow of temple of dreams, obv. i always had a little more affection for curve’s cover on Ruby Trax too :-D
“surely not just a rip out and pitch up job on the original? ” even if it was they wouldn’t admit it. just like the ‘this mortal coil’ sample/not-sample :-/
The free software that came with my Mac! iMovie or something. I spent approximately 45 minutes on the whole thing: 30 mins to work out in my befuddled state that dragging and dropping some pictures onto the thing at the bottom worked just fine + ten mins finding rest of the pictures + 1 min plonking all the screenwipes inbetween them + 4 mins uploading it all to youtube. EASY. I’m sure if I’d been arsed I could have stopped it zooming in on all the pictures like that but it turned out ok anyway :)
iMovie is amazing rly.
When I was trying to make a video of stills of Lytton’s face set to the Henry’s Cat theme tune it took me a billion hours on the Windows equivalent.
Windows Movie Maker is peasy too tho!
I think Messiah get away with it. Nice version imho.