“Love You Inside Out
(The Pinches Mix)”
by Cole Medina
(MP3)
Ed Caraeff
Sure, the Bee Gees made great dance tracks, but “Love You Inside
Out” was never one of them. Number one in June 1979, the song+++ is too
hammy by half, particularly its melodramatic bridge, the chorus’s
downward-slide guitars, and the synths doubling a brief vocal line at
the beginning. Though Feist covered it on 2004’s Let It Die,
today, “Love You Inside Out” sounds largely like an aural bumper
sticker for its year, in a way the far more overexposed likes of
“Stayin’ Alive” somehow manage not to.
So why does this reedited version of “Love You Inside Out,” by
pseudonymous L.A. producer Cole Medina, an old hand at reediting
vintage disco records into modern house, sound less like a retread than
an event?
Medina takes the Bee Gees’ dry original (there’s very little reverb
on their record, bridge aside) and soaks it, filtering the groove and
adding a dense layer of reverb to a couple of stray synth and string
lines till they evoke stars-against-blackness aural space, against
which everything, from chicka-wah guitar flecks to cymbal shimmers,
sounds appropriately silvery and alien. Streamlining and buffering the
rhythm till it seems to float by in audacious slow motion, this mix
transforms a relatively chaste pop-disco song into the fuck-hungriest
groove anyone’s carved out all year.
What makes it even bolder is the way Medina reconfigures the lyric.
He snips everything but the first two verses, kicking to the curb the
song’s original chorus (fine by me) and bridge (hallelujah). Verse
one—”Baby, I can’t figure it out/Your kisses taste like
honey/Sweet lies don’t give me no rise/Oh, oh, what you’re trying to
do?”—is looped until it becomes an obsessive mantra that more
than matches the music’s determined throb, and the second, balladlike
verse is dubbed into pure glossolalia: “Livin’ on your cheatin’ and the
pain/Grows inside me, it’s enough” becomes “Livin’ on… ide me, it’s
enough,” leaving you to fill in the blanks. As arguments for secondhand
creativity go, this is awfully enticing. 