Bertelli – “Sharan”: Stay true!

My first review on this blog is, by the very nature of being first, something special.

And I have chosen a track that gave me a solid rush down memory lane and thus a chance to look back to what lead to the creation of this blog:

This is a new track (released just a couple of weeks ago) that takes me right back to the clubbing scene around the turn of the century. Back then the club scene were dominated by three genres: Trance, Hard House and Progressive House. Those three covered the essence of clubbing: Trance pushed the epic themes, hard house fed the kids on speed frenetic hard dance, and Progressive House provided a groove for the clubs that kept us going for hours and hours. Around that time I’d been the editor-in-chief for the main clubbing site in Oslo for a few years and I had just started DJing. Both being the reasons why I am now, more than a decade later, motivated to create this blog. To pull the gems, the good stuff, out in the public.

And Sharan is a track that deserves our attention. It embarks on one single mission, and that is to  establish a groove and steadily build on that. And it does it so well:

The kick is prominent, the vocal processing is just perfect, the bass line is rock solid, the production are using all those little trickles that we love to be fed while on the dance floor. It’s predictable enough to make us look like we know what the hell we’re doing, and progressive enough to turn up the heat, bar by bar, with the calm and confidence of a true progressive house track. It may not bring a lot of new to the table, but it does what it does exceptionally well. It’s true.

Kids, take notice: This is progressive house. Not the “pop music in house disguise” that Stockholm House Mafia had the nerve to label “progressive house” and with good help from Deadmau5 and the likes practically ruined the genre in doing so.

Thank you for keeping it real, Bertelli.