Artful Dodger UK: Re-Rewind

Arrangers and producers Mark Hill and Peter Devereux, who are Artful Dodger (along with singer Craig David on this track), fill these three mixes with synth bass, sound effects, and stammered, filtered vocals. It’s all very diverting, but in essence they’re trying to make a mountains out of a molehill. Listening to this, I was reminded of the first time I heard some Pet Shop Boys remixes from which most of the vocals of the original songs had disappeared; taking that duo’s strength, songwriting, and removing almost everything that makes them stand out, subsuming it into then-contemporary dance beats. It made for a disappointing listen, as does this.

A good record can be made of a bad song, just as the opposite is true, but on “Re-Rewind,” Artful Dodger show themselves to be better record-makers than songwriters. And in both cases, they’ve got a ways to go.

This has been, necessarily, a shorter review than is usual for PopMatters for the simple reason that it’s a single with two remixes, and there just aren’t 400-500 words to be said about all but the most astonishing of singles. And this is not that.