Steve Gilmore Reviews: The Redshirt - Warmed Up

Hear The Track Here

Artist: The Redshirt
Title: Warmed Up

The Redshirt (not to be confused with anything else of a bloody colour) is an MP3 Unsigned artist I have not had the pleasure to review as yet, but just reading some of the blurb on his page gave me much to chew over. A electronica artist from California The Redshirt claims he is ' is the start of a revolution back to the big beats of electronic music. We have slowly let our electronic music slip into sisyness, and we need someone to jump start this movement. And i am your man.....so who's with me?' Couldn't agree more about the general insipidness of a lot of today's electronica and listing Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Prodigy as your influences can only serve to pique my curiosity, if not yours...

In particular, the Chemical Brothers, interest me greatly - more so since I had the chance to remix their Galvanize track last year, and that is the closest musical reference to this track. There's that almost mayhem feel about the track from the get go which is a big plus to dragging an unwilling listener into a genre they wouldn't normally listen to. Therein lies the real problem with electronica, the market for it is nothing like as big as people make it out to be. For this reviewer, for an electronica track to SURPASS its genre it's gotta have much more on the ball than most. As good as Warmed Up is - and if you like the genre, it is well tasty - it still falls over in a couple of places where I feel it may have attracted a wider listening audience.

There is a fair bit of repetition (particularly in the vocal samples) and - for my money - a lot time should have been spent on post production. There are some blisteringly good sounds on this track and as phat as it is, it could have done with a lot more fattening up of the individual sounds if you get my drift. For me, a track like this really SHOULD blow me the fekk into next week and this track just misses its mark. Not that The Redshirt should feel anything but proud of this track, I'm just an old nitpicker who should know better. As I say, if you like the genre you will like this but I fear it would need to have a lot more impact than it does to attract a more casual electronica listener. Nonetheless, it's fairly obvious that if this is an example of what The Redshirt does, then it's only a question of coming across the right track.