About the review

Title: The Law
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Artist: De Vis
Genre: Electronica: Dance
Reviewed by: Spectra on October 24, 2007 (All reviews by Spectra)

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1Overall Description
Simple well produced house song with the kind of very catchy lead melody you'd expect from De Vis.
While the melody and bass-line take separate paths, these two instruments compose the only two melodic layers in the song leaving a bit of a bare/unfinished sound.
The drum grooves however, are quite full sounding (if not as variant as they should be) with smart use of stereo delays that make a basic house drum set feel more like a full fledged break-beat.
As with De-Vis's track Vis-O-Frenic, the arrangement essentially is the core of the song due to the stress on drums over the melody, though this track is decidedly less creative the Vis-O-Frenic.
 
2Creativity Description
The drum grooves are very solid, yet don't exactly do anything that surprises me as my "production ear" hears a basic house beat under all stereo those delay parameters rather than innovative quantization, snare position shifting, and other mixing tricks that could take the beat beyond "solid basis" and toward "astounding". The melody, while solid, doesn't evolve and only has two layers (bassline and main lead)...a back-up layer such as strings or a wah guitar would fill the spectrum up much better and avoid the incomplete-intro melody feel that hangs in this song.
 
3Artistic License Description
Hard to say, again everything that's here is solid, it just sounds incomplete. The samples are all clear and well matches, the delay echoes enable the groove to avoid "dead spots" where not a single drum is sounded, the sound and motive-intensive melodic nature is instantly recognizable as classic-style house music...but the lack of extra oomph and mystery/progression keeps a lot of this catchy-ness from really sticking in your head. Side note "Living in Cuba" (also from De-Vis) does some of the kind of full on melodic layering (with the wah guitar) that I hope to see eventually work its way into this track.
 
4Arrangement Description
The intros, outros....are all there and come in at the right time but, again, are done a bit incompletely IE a simply drop of the bassdrum at 1:25 starts the outro part rather than, say, a bass-kick roll or position change, snare rotation onto an offbeat, slight chord change, and a few sound effects.
 
5Sound Quality Description
I'm not going to let any of my other opinions here influence this rating...although this sound seems to have about 65% of the number of layers and variations it needs to really take off as a fully done house song whats there sounds crystal clear and professionally balanced.
 
6Does it work as a piece of music Description
It does for what it is...unfortunately what it is seems to be a solid start to an excellent house tune rather than an excellent house tune. More melodic layers, beat variation (actually this artist's own song Hyperactive is a strong example of good beat variation and progression), and oomph in the transitions between parts (see the arrangement section) would make this track reach its full potential.
 
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