Oliver Heldens came out of nowhere to create Gecko, which has subsequently been a massive hit around the world with the introduction of Becky Hill’s vocals. His unique sound certainly caught the eye of music lovers, but instead of including a bit of variation with each release, we are beginning to hear the same sound over and over. Personally, I actually enjoy his tracks, but if put together I can imagine them to sound fairly similar…
He seems to depend on the theme of animals for his solo tracks, Gecko and Koala may just be the beginning. Today is the day that Pikachu releases. That’s right, resorting to Pokemon to create a catchy track. His collaboration with Mr Belt & Wezol is, nevertheless, a catchy track and I can see it having a great deal of success as basically all of Spinnin’ Records tracks have in the past.
Furthermore, he previously collaborated with Sander Van Doorn on the track “This”, but we can’t really call it a collab as it was basically Heldens’ trademark sound with a drum beat. No change there then. I can’t take anything away from this man as he must have made a lot of money from this trademark sound that got him recognised in the first place, but some variety would be nice!
But let’s be honest. This year has been fairly eye-opening within the music scene. We saw the so-called “Dubstep is dead” and the Beatport stats that threw everyone off. To an extent the stats were correct in a sense, all forms of house (notably by Spinnin’ Records) goes straight to the top of the Beatport charts. The question is why? Why is the demand or the love for house so great? These are questions I can’t answer, in my opinion it sounds generic and becomes a little boring. At least in other genres there is a much wider variety and greater opportunity to form a unique sound with software available. We just hear the same drum beat and bassline with the majority of these house tracks. It’s beyond me why it’s so popular.
Here’s an image of the Beatport sales that sparked this chaos:
Feel free to click on the image to see an enlarged version.
Anyway here is a playlist of the tracks that Oliver has recently done and includes a few remixes:
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this topic.
DB
It's All About The Bass 