The latest release on the best new label this year to be named after a vagina will please two different crowds.
London-based Snatch! Records is the brainchild of Riva Starr, an attempt to sniff out new talent and give it some well-deserved recognition. German production duo Tapesh & Maximiljan certainly are hitting a wide range with this EP, which should appeal to both the tech housers and filter fans.
“Tool de France” (not named after Nicolas Sarkozy. We checked) feels like a vintage number. Carried by a two-note loop, crisp hi-hats that dare not deviate and filters that go on forever it could be a long-lost tune recently rediscovered in the vaults of that late-90s phenomenon, that style which some insist on calling French Touch.
Where “Tool de France” grooves along pleasantly, never really building to any discernible climax, its flipside is definitely going somewhere. “Wide Range” is more of a techy affair, with a bendy bassline that bubbles beneath all the clattering drums to surface every so often in blarey swells.
While they’re both good tunes in their own right, they just don’t feel very now, darling. And while all the elements are there and get on together very well indeed, the end result is just a bit… innocuous. Nothing a good remix can’t sort though. Riva!?
Wide Range EP is released on September 7th.
Leonie Mercedes
It’s rare that a remix betters the original, but that’s exactly what Riva Starr delivers with a supremely confident mix that joins the dots and fills in the gaps of what was essentially a mash-up, and turns it into something that almost resembles a song. An irrepressible piano hook and energetic percussion drive things forward for a mix that is unashamedly commercial and, without a doubt, destined for wide appeal. Remember Gadjo’s ‘So Many Times’? This is its spiritual successor.
