Mademoiselle Caro & Franck Garcia: Soldiers
Buzzin' Fly
Buzzin' Fly's electronic-pop duo, Paris-based DJ Mademoiselle Caro and Perpignan-based Franck Garcia, return with “Soldiers,” a heartfelt and more-than-promising preview of their upcoming sophomore album, Left. The tune's a luscious example of melancholy dance music that's drenched in warm synthetic washes and buoyed by a breezy chorus (“The soldiers are coming / The soldiers are waiting / Now it's time / To confess my sins”) and a lithe, bass-powered groove—the duo even sneaks in a New Order-ish lead bass line during the song's final minute. As they did to such memorable effect on their debut album Pain Disappears, Caro and Garcia pair up for the vocals, and being so different in pitch and timbre, their voices complement one another with preternatural ease.
As choice as the duo's song undoubtedly is, however, Ben Watt's fabulous remix almost renders it secondary in this EP release context. The Buzzin' Fly head re-casts the original as a nine-minute club epic that just won't be denied—talk about cranking up the emotional heat. The jacking house groove drives with unswerving purpose as Watt winds up the trance quotient and Caro's now-solo vocal sails in with the chorus. During a sparkling mid-song breakdown, Watt re-introduces the duo's paired voices before shifting the focus back to the now-snappy, bass-throbbing attack. The remix by The Revenge is wholly unlike Watt's. First of all, Garcia's voice is heard alone at the start, and secondly the original's groove is turned into a plodding disco-rock backbeat. Meaty bass synths and double-time hi-hats form the underlying thread for a mid-tempo treatment that's decent enough but, frankly, no match for Watt's (for the record, the release also include vocal-less dub versions of the remixes).May 2010