Fragmented images accompanied by a solid soundtrack and a thoroughly cohesive poetic narrative to be shared – so goes the brilliant contrast you’ll encounter when taking a look at the new music video for Eddie Cohn’s “Animals” remix this September. Indeed, it goes without saying that Cohn’s magnificent compositional wit was bound to be the star of this show no matter how daring the imagery in the video, but the duality of this piece is endearing nonetheless. The remix of “Animals” on its own was already a multidimensional delight, but through this lens, its cosmetics are perhaps all the harder to ignore.
Cohn’s vocal is an element of textural expressiveness meant to sit beside the instrumentation in this mix rather than atop it, which is something that impressed me right out of the gate in this release. He has every reason to be cocky behind the microphone – his harmonies are downright haunting in this piece, and yet he refrains out of a desire to frame these lyrics with utter stoicism or profound yearning when necessary. This is an artist who doesn’t want us walking away untouched by the material, and that’s clear from start to finish in “Animals (Remix).”
This reworked version of “Animals” pushes the envelope with its beat, producing an assaultive, unpredictable rhythm that feels a lot more urgent than the original cut of the song did. The tempo just sounds more pressurized in this instance than it did the first time around, largely because the melodic trappings have been polished so much more than they originally were. There’s an industrious component to the backend that I didn’t pick up on until hearing this cut, and if it’s something Cohn can recreate down the line, I can see it being of particular use in his experimental works.
Watch the video for “Animals (Remix)” below
I love the physicality of this single, and I don’t know that any of the elements in the master mix sound even slightly slim in comparison to what a lot of mainstream pop has been consisting of lately. There’s muscle to be heard in everything from the vocal to the bass to the percussion and the lucid synthetic binding between them, but it’s not being presented in such a fashion as to leave the listener feeling beaten up by the speakers. It’s a thin line between decadence and overindulgence, but Cohn is the sort of player who knows how to stick to the former over the latter no matter the circumstance.
“Animals (Remix)” is one of the best remixes I’ve had the opportunity to spin and review over the past couple of months, and for Eddie Cohn, it offers another example of his eminence as a songwriter, arranger, and producer in his own right. There isn’t much this player can’t do, and after acquiring more than twenty-thousand streams in a little over a month’s time, it’s safe to say that the response to the video for this song has been impressive. Cohn’s depth isn’t reliant on mainstream approval but that of his fans, and from where I sit, he’s got another certifiable hit in this release.