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Helado Negro - Dance Ghost

Come see this guy perform at Threewalls' Starwalker gala this June!

[[GROOVES N JAMS S.O.T.Y. 2013]]

[nO. 30/50]

"Dance Ghost" by Helado Negro

MG:

What percentage of the population is ignorant to the existence of the down jacket? "Dance Ghost" can be their theme song, a throbbing spin cycle of damp humidity. It's hard to imagine Helado Negro's world ever cools down enough to warrant long sleeves, much less a heavy coat. He traffics in music so warm that sweat beads across its surface.

DV:

Helado Negro had a few standout tracks this year, but "Dance Ghost" was the best of them: simultaneously tapping into an oceanic undertow and a feather-light float, it's built on a gorgeously low-key groove. "Dance Ghost" slides up to you, pulls you in, envelops you with its charming embrace. The hook says, "There's no one home," but the song sounds like belonging.

#gnj soty2k13 #best songs 2013 #dance ghost #helado negro #music

Ghost File: Dance Ghost

Dance Ghost is a close personal ghost friend of mine. He loves to dance, and he also loves to gossip, but he'll only share his secrets with you if you do a dance for him.

I don't have the heart to explain to him that this is not what 1920s gangsters did.

#ghosts #ghost file #dance ghost

The second listen did it for me. Idk, there's like this lazy juno-106 sounding pad... striving for the lazy perfection. 16/20

#helado negro #dance ghost #striving for the lazy perfection #the orchids

"We Will You" by Helado Negro

DV:

Like "Dance Ghost," which we covered way back in February, "We Will You" finds Helado Negro occupying a liminal space between dance and experimental ambient. But where "Dance Ghost" started out with a strong groove that made its 4:53 running time seem much shorter than it was, "We Will You" stretches out so that even though it's only about a minute longer, it seems practically cinematic in comparison. The song resists obvious structure, retreating from the initial refrain with a wash of noise that fades back into the beat but doesn't quite resolve. Even when the vocals return - first heavily distorted, then in a second layer replicating the heavily echoed opening refrain - they can't dissipate the nervous conflict at the song's core.

But when the vocals finally drop out again, Helado Negro drives at the sort of catharsis that I'd been expecting all along. Turns out that in this uneasy marriage of sound and genre, the "refrain" was basically functioning as verses - the production is the chorus. The beat hits harder, the fuzz and crackle gets louder, the synths shimmer higher and higher: the climax to "We Will You" isn't clear, but after the journey the song's taken us on, it sure as hell is cathartic.

MG:

"Dance Ghost" is easily one of my favorite songs of the year, and what I've come to love about it, and a love that I'm extending to "We Will You" is that it's genre transcendent. I suppose Helado Negro is something of a dance musician, that dancing is the endgame (especially of a song with that word in its title), but more often than not, I can't find a mood for all the ambience of broadly dance music. Helado Negro is compelling because a song like "Dance Ghost" can bead sweat on your forehead from all its humidity. It's a cuban sandwich in a sea of neon on a Miami beach. "We Will You" isn't so locale specific, but its message is just as straightforward. As the song subverts the conventions of structure, Negro sings "It's a strange, impossible meaning / you're a strange, impossible feeling." Hidden in the cabals of rhythm and bass are some distinctly gothic lyrics. I've grown weary of distorted, down pitch-shifted vocals. More and more I want to hear a human voice, no matter how conventionally awful that voice is. Negro's use of the technique isn't plot device as much as it's character flourish. He uses it the way witch house played with chopped and screwed. It's a song that explores the dark (or perhaps ordinary, depending on which glass you're looking at) side of love, and so his depressed vocal reflects that search. I agree with DV that the chorus to "We Will You" is wordless and that's another shrewd decision. Most songwriters would use cliche to connect to their heartbroken audience - the baser the language, the better it's understood. Negro leaves that behind in the verses and offers up a moment that's singular even as it's obviously the aural equivalent of eyes welling over with tears. As with the handful of songs that make up my favorite dance tracks, you could move along with "We Will You," but it's hardly necessary in order to follow where the song leads.

#helado negro #we will you #dance ghost #music #new music #mp3