Syke N Sugarstarr pres. CeCe Rogers - No Love Lost

OK, so let me from the outset that I am a big CeCe Rogers fan and have been for a while. He has a great voice and if allowed to caress a song with his richness, can only add flavour and colour to any tune. That’s why his voice should be allowed to flourish on any composition he puts his name to.

Skye N Sugarstarr have opted for ten remixes on this CD, and I must question why so many? Especially when in the first case SE:SA make such limited use of CeCe’s vocals. The track is a minimalist dub version that really doesn’t do the song much justice. Then we get D.O.N.S. vs DBN giving the tune a touch. Much more electro here. Filthy dirty bass and then, the ethereal touch that they’re so famous for. A beautiful caress of strings gives way to CeCe’s vocals, and they are allowed to build. The D.O.N.S. certainly know how to let a tune evolve. It doesn’t however smash in the guts with earth juddering force but it gets you going nonetheless.

Then we have the original extended version. The vocal takes forever to drop here, and the chorus peaks nicely but without grabbing me in any specific way. Then we have the Muzzaik remixes. The first one starts off a little minimalist and keeps the song alive with a low level bass accompanied by the vocal. You’re left expecting your head to be smashed on the rocks of a bone jarring tune, but the track retains a subdued feel. The second mix is a little sharper, but there’s not much in it. A trance-like ambient track that leaves the listener begging the question, “when are you going to take the roof off?” Sadly this doesn’t happen.

Gold Ryan and Taresh also follow this low level start and then build the track to a peak that doesn’t really climb, as it falls into a bottomless abyss. The bassline is very much akin to Kings of Tomorrow and Finally, but you need a vocal of immense proportions to achieve that and then have to have a melody that is not drowned out by the accompanying instruments. This could have been brilliant had they shown a little restraint. Still works well but could have been better.

Then out of all the ho-hum remixes that promised so much and delivered just a barely breathing corpse, out comes Mark Duran. He electrifies the track with some sharp stabs and lets it build. Some electro organ sits underneath the beats and then he lets you have it. Some good electro guitar, a bit soft but there, the vocals sitting nicely on top of it. Some strings allowing CeCe to do what he does best. The Onelove crew will love this.

So here we have 10 versions of the one song, among which only one allows the tune to evolve and the singer to pitch his tent. Perhaps if they had reduced the number of mixes we could have concentrated on only the ones that displayed the true grit of the song and the talents of Ce Ce Rogers, rather than the knob twiddlers and tweekers who detracted from it.

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