LF System - Afraid To Feel

There's a tweet I can never stop thinking about where someone makes a poll about what speed people tend to listen to their music at. The OP suggests that they typically listen at 2.0x and sometimes go to 3.0x, both of which are options in the poll that is overwhelmingly drowned out by the common sense response of 1.0x, with the replies near universally baffled at the notion that this is even something to be questioned.

I'm not about to do one of those 'kids these days' posts, but I always think of this tweet whenever an older song goes viral on TikTok which often times is the song not playing at its normal speed, often pitched and reverbed. I guess enough movie trailers have convinced people that they like this sort of thing, though it is also amusing to look up a song on YouTube and find search queries for people who want to set it at a speed which you are capable of manually setting any YouTube video to, but that's just me.

Anyway this is all leading me to say that I highly recommend listening to Silk's "I Can't Stop (Turning You On)", which is the blueprint of this track. It's genuinely a great soul record that is practically unknown outside of this interpolation. Then listen to the song at 1.5x speed and realise that you are basically listening to "Afraid To Feel". LF SYSTEM are truly just another cog in the machine of normalising atypical listening speeds.

This is not me having a go at them though, I genuinely love this sort of crate-digging hitmaking. I'm a fan of The Avalanches after all. The sorts of stories of artists rummaging around for samples amidst bargain bins of forgotten records and finding something special? That's a music nerd's dream. I also find it interesting to see where they take the song. One of my favourite minor things a song can do is add really tiny flourishes to a chorus multiple times throughout the chorus where you might not even notice unless you listen to it back to back that you're not just hearing copy/pasted audio. "Petty" by Eluera is one of my favourite songs recently to do this, and I am using this space to plug that song because what an overlooked pop banger. The original Silk track does this with the additional vocals, which you'll recognise as the 'yes, yes, ooh yes' bit that doesn't show up until the second chorus. LF SYSTEM take the opposite approach here and use the later chorus rendition right from the start, which I can't say is good or bad but it's an interesting switch up.

In reality LF SYSTEM didn't sample the song in the traditional sense, but for clearance issues, re-built it from the ground up with different vocals as well. I think it's my biggest knock against the song because I find the new vocalist (Louise Claire Marshall) to come out just a tad too shrill over the mix, and that aforementioned affectation on the chorus has never quite sat right with me ever since my first listen. It's pretty neat though, and interesting to hear a new house hit on the radio that's actually trying to be creative.