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Showtek
» Analogue Players In A Digital World
Reviewed by Adam Symbiosis
/ Submitted 21-10-09 15:25
Label: Dutch Master Works
Format: CD
Genre: Hardstyle
With a string of awards and a legion of fans, Showtek are taking control of dancefloors around the globe and helping to advance the march of hardstyle to your front door. With their new album Analogue Players In A Digital World will they be storming the charts?
Now I’m not so much into my hardstyle, but as with all music I went into listen to this album with an open mind.
Taking the idea of having intros leading into the music and giving the album a real appeal to sit down and listen to the whole way through, the album kicks off with the satirically aggressive The F-Track. Rock influences feature in Rockchild as a guitar chugs away with the vocal dexterity of dutch MC DV8 who pops up a few more times across the album. Highlight of the album for me was track We Speak Music. I loved the how the posh female accent sounded so completely out of place with the music yet strangely familiar and soothing. The riff really rocked me too.
British MC Stretch, now resident in Holland, appears on Dutchie and his tough cockney accent fits the bill perfectly for this ode to puff, puff, pass. I can easily see this appearing somewhere on Guy Ritchie’s next movie.
It’s interesting they include samples from Australian news following 30 GHB overdoses at the X-Qlusive dance event back in Dec 2008 in track My 303, especially as it gives you an insight into the dance scene in Australia, where GHB is so much more widely taken.
The rest of the album is not something you are likely to share with Granny over Sunday dinner, but that’s not really the point. What is the point is that the uncompromising nature of the beats are tinged with fun, cool riffs and interesting samples. If you like your hard dance, then why have you not already pre-ordered this CD? Anyway, while you are waiting for it to land onyour door step, check out this exclusive mini interview:
Hard Dance Award winners. Globetrekking performers. Your own shows in Oz. What else do you have planned to achieve?
We really want to break through to the United States. It’s such a huge country and luckily enough the music business is much better than in Holland (Illegal downloading and stuff like that is not as easy as in the Netherlands). Our album in 2007 had a huge amount of legal downloads in the USA, that’s why we could sell out a 4000 capacity party in LA. But that’s not enough yet, it’s only the beginning! Hopefully our newest album will even open more doors. In our World Tour we have some nice gigs in New York, Seattle, LA so let’s see what happens. It will take some time, but we do everything step by step like we always do. Another market is Asia and the first step there is also already made. But we won’t tell what we did, you guys have to wait a while..
You talked in our last interview about producing a different sound for your second album. Where did you take your influences from and why is it different?
Well, our first album which was a huge success was a little bit more gimmicky kind of, catchy songs. This album contains a bit more “mature” tunes. Some tracks sounds more accessible or mainstream, not all of them but you know. When you are rocking this business for years you always reach a point where you think “what’s next”?. We want to go more worldwide, so we had to sound even more mature, that’s what we did. The variety of tracks is massive, we’ve got trancy tracks, simple kick bass tracks, soft & hard tracks, industrial tracks, mainstream tracks, we have combined it all.
The second album is often the most difficult for artists. Was this the case for you and why?
Not really. Our first album was a double disc, cause on CD 1 we had Showtek tracks and on CD 2 we had a CD with co-productions or alter ego tracks. But we chose to put the focus on just Showtek, so we did one fat disc with Showtek tunes.
We did some really nice tracks which we think are top notch productions. Totally not hardstyle produced, just Showtek catchy style. We wanted something else, still hard based but not the same. So we just started with a very clear mind and with a huge goal to reach and we’ve come away very satisfied. Some people might have to listen some of the other tracks before they like it, but that’s just because it’s not standard. We are sorry to say a lot of hardstyle is pretty much similar lately. But for us it’s already a masterpiece!
Where do you hope to take hard style? Do you think it can become the next big thing in global dance music?
We are putting ourselves on a higher level. We don’t want to be put into the hardstyle “box” where everybody thinks just “hardstyle”, because nobody has the guts to do something different and to change the quality of the sound.
So the first step was leaving our bookings agency and leaving the rest of world behind us. The second step was doing a quality album so we could show the world how this kind of music can sound like and that it’s not just a harder kind of dance music. It’s Showtek and it works all over the globe. We don’t have to be the next Tiësto, cause that’s like when you start a new fast-food restaurant and telling the world you are going to be the new McDonalds, it’s never gonna happen. So no we don’t have to be the best or most famous. We took some steps in our career the last few months which were very important for us. The rest will follow someway. Only then will we get the same appreciation from the media of mainstream organizations as trance does. No matter how big we are right now, going from city to city, plane in plane out, we are still the guys from the hardstyle scene! We just have to have patience!
Go to www.showtek.nl for more info or go to www.analogueplayersinadigitalworld.com for the album info. Cheers!
Click here to win yourself a copy of Showtek’s new album!
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Comments:
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From: PPR on 28th Oct 2009 12:58.49
SHOWTEK - THE MASTERS OF HARD STYLE!!
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