One way to pull me in, to instill a feeling in my gut that “I have to fucking write about this song” is to include distorted screams that punctuate a track like guttural cries, kicks and punches to my soft underbelly. And the Lovelife remix of Dive In’s “Let Go” does that to the nth degree, playing and pulling at my gut like the original track is a chain attached to my bellybutton and the remix is a speeding car on its way to “run wild” tearing me to bits.

Which is to say that I have a bit of macabre critic’s heart, always being drawn to songs that feel like a kick to the face. I just can’t write about songs that don’t, it feels like having an affair on my creativity. And on this remix, those punctuated shouts interspersed in between  a reinvigorated piano driveline smooth over the original’s one glaring weakness: its inability to rise from the wobbly, imaginary stilts of a “happy song”.

I don’t trust happy songs, technically I don’t even think they exist–I believe a lot of emotions are real, with unadulterated happiness, however, being the chief amongst those people lie to themselves about. And as much as I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling in the original that it didn’t dishonestly misunderstand its purpose of being a track about throwing one’s self into the scariest emotion of all, trust.

Which is an interesting problem of Dive In’s production; because I’m all about the playful dichotomy between pleasant, joyous production and dark lyrics. But Dive In’s version was just over that line into “skipping hands in hands down the road” despite some really poignant lyricism. Lovelife’s versi0n, on the other hand, made me want to jump off high cliffs into the surf, hand in hand with a monumental person that makes me ‘feel real’,  connecting me to the moment (caution be damned).

Catch a free download at Lovelife’s Soundcloud.

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