Record of the Year Revisited: 1998

Original Record of the Year: Lucid - I Can't Help Myself

I'm a bit critic of vocal trance music and rightfully so. Some of the vocal trance records around the turn of the century are just as bad as the David Guetta type EDM of today or the 2 Unlimited type Eurodance of the early 90s.

Yet here I was picking a vocal trance record as my record of the year from 1998. It also comes from a duo of which one worked extensively with Pete Waterman and the other wrote music for S Club 7.

This all sounds terrible on paper so what possessed me to pick this as my record of the year?

Well simply because it's a good tune. Not all vocal trance is bad, not all music from the Pete Waterman stable is bad and I'd even be open to listening to an S Club 7 song if I found it any good.

My biggest gripe with vocal trance is the vocals and the actual music sounding too obvious. Yet neither are always bad things. 

In this record the way the vocals are made to sound like a saw in places gives them character. Music doesn't need to be complex to be good and this certainly isn't complex. At the same time its not following any rules. 

When a lot of genres get more popular they start to follow a tried and test formula and it gets stale. More often than not though there are interesting records that came before and I think this is one of those.