gullbuy music review

Dave Clarke w/Chicks On Speed

title

What Was Her Name?

label

Skint

format
CD5

Dave Clark CD5 coverWhat Was Her Name? was the first single from Dave Clarke's Devil's Advocate album. Even though this is a Dave Clarke single in fact and in name, any fans of Chicks On Speed need to own this, as it contains 4 mixes of an excellent track that could have been on any Chicks On Speed record.

The song is based on the Bauhaus track She's In Parties, from their Devil's Advocate record.. The blend of this classic (not sampled, but redone) with Alex Murray-Leslie , Melissa Logan and Kiki Moore's story lyrics works real well. The song also features a wordless backing vocal that reminds me of the end of Pere Ubu's Final Solution.

The radio mix cuts 20 seconds of music intro from the beginning of the track and shortens the instrumental passages close to the end of the track. This version did not need to be here at all. Maybe thelabel hoped the track would be a radio hit and there is some rule about charting songs only being around three and a half minutes long?

The LFO mix is a straight techno instrumental that concentrates on the Pere Ubu-ish wordless vocal, not the Chicks On Speed vocals or the Bauhaus song. It is my least favorite, as I'm not a big techno fan and I like the Chicks On Speed presence on the track. On the positive side, this mix helps to make the single more diverse, instead of just being 4 somewhat similar versions of the same track.

The Black Strobe remix takes away almost all of the Bauhaus track, and instead concentrates on a hard techno ColdWave beat and a sample of Kraftwerk's Robots. Black Strobe are Arnaud Reotini and Ivan Smagghe from Paris.

---Carl, April 5, 2005