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(Falcon St Beats/Creative Vibes)
Side A1: I Got (Magic Number remix) 3.51
Side A2: I Got (Bump City remix) 3.30
Side B1: I Got (Fsard remix) 5.21
Side B2: I Got (El Loco remix) 3.39
Despite the minimal artist info that came with this white label 12”, I’ve been able to ascertain the facts that Fast Crew are apparently a new hiphop / dance outfit hailing from New Zealand, and that this slab of vinyl is the first in an ongoing series of releases from Sydney breakbeat label Falcon St Beats, which will pit a range of artists against locally-sourced remixers. This first release from Fast Crew manages to straddle the territory between hiphop beats and nu skool breaks, with a range of remixes geared towards different ends of the dancefloor.
In the absence of an ‘Original version’ mix, the Magic Number remix featuring Revelino leads off the A-side of this 12”, with a mid-tempo 4/4 house beat and squelching analogue synths providing a bouncing poppy undercarriage for the Fast Crew’s hiphop rhymes – in many ways, leaning directly closer to the funky commercial pop end of the ‘urban’ market, with a synthy funk bass hook slotting in next to a female RNB vocal break that could easily have jumped off of a Fabolous or Usher record.
While it might not be completely to the tastes of those geared towards harder beats , it’s certainly well made pop with a catchy hook that’ll lodge in your head, and to be perfectly honest, if I have any reservation with this track it primarily involves the very US rnb-sounding accents employed here (mind you, there could be some sort of parallel NZ / J.Wess effect going on that I might not be aware of). The Bump City remix meanwhile slows thing down to a smooth hiphop crawl that ventures through throbbing bassy electro synths and cross-faded vocal dropouts; in many ways I easily preferred it to the previous mix, as I felt the vocal sat slightly more snugly over the old-skool styled hiphop beats, with the occasional fragments of scratching counterbalancing the glossiness of the vocals.
On the flip, Sydney-based breaks producer Fsard opts for a chunky nu-skool breaks direction in the vein of BLIM / Atomic Hooligan for his reworking, cutting up and scattering the original vocals throughout the mix, while fat buzzing synth bass and funk guitar riffs provide the momentum behind some particularly hard-edged breaks, timestretched and filtered vocals spinning around through the rhythms, before the El Loco remix brings this package of mixes to a close, with a looped sample of Indian instrumentation making its snakelike way beneath sampled jazzy horn stabs, buzzing electro synths and smoothly rolling handclaps. Combining an intriguing fusion of Eastern instrumental atmospheres, glossy commercial rnb and jazzy downtempo hiphop beats in a one curious whole, it was easily my favourite of the four remixes on offer here.
A good 12” remix package with the four mixes enclosed taking the original track to considerably different places; while some may find the Magic Number remix slightly too glossy and pop-oriented, they’re more than catered for by Fsard’s chunky breaks reworking on the flip, which definitely adds a welcome dark counterbalancing edge to proceedings.
