A quick reference check and I find the original version of this song, from The Fods 2024 album, Don’t ARgue to be a neat slice of indie rock with a slight Brit-pop, or at least late eighties vibe, painting a buoyant groove at its heart. Fast-forward a couple of years, and now we find that it has evolved into a different beast altogether.
The Fods, having teamed up with Night Wolf, allowed him to work his magic; the song was stripped bare, with the lead vocal essentially the only bridge between the two versions, leveled and then built anew. Where it was once powerful, it is now poised. Where it once rocked, and rocked like a good ‘en, now it seems to be an almost hymnal blues groove running on a spacious dance beat. Where it once followed a recognizable template…and there is nothing wrong with music made of familiar elements, almost all music does that, now it transcends, or at least obscures the idea of music genres.
It feels like an old gospel spiritual or, thanks to a swathe of brooding cellos, a dark slice of classical music readorned for the modern age, a song stripped to its essence and clothed in new sonic trappings from across genres and eras, the cutting edge and the timeless, the past and the present, and in doing so making music for the future.
But that is the great thing about remixes, reworkings, reimaginations. With a different mind, a different musical outlook, and a different set of hands at work, we get to hear what a song would sound like if it had traveled a different path, lived an alternative life. It is the sound of a song becoming its own sonic sibling, meeting a brother it never knew it had, the same yet different.
It is a brave artist who allows another to rework their music so completely, but one listen to this new take on “Kickback” makes it clear that the rewards are more than worth the trust the band placed in a collaborator like Night Wolf. It also reminds us that a great song is a great song, no matter how it is remolded and remixed and redelivered.
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