Sunday 16 June 2013

Delta goes dance with the help of Ryan Tedder!

A trend has emerged over the last few years of acts that you'd never associate with dance music releasing dance influenced singles. The latest example of this is the new single by Australian Delta Goodrem, my all time favourite singer. Co-written by Delta with OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder amongst others, Heart Hypnotic is quite unlike anything Delta's ever put her voice to before. Though she's dabbled with some dance sounds before on the likes of Take Me Home and last year's single Dancing With A Broken Heart, neither used the  stabbing trance riffs and full on dance production employed by Heart Hypnotic. 


Best known for her ballads, such as Born To Try, Lost Without You, Almost Here and Believe Again, hearing Delta singing on a dance track is rather unexpected, much like the first time hearing Leona Lewis on Collide. Delta's unique voice really works well on the Avicii-esque euphoric stomper that also uses the same chorus buildup sound effect that was found in Rihanna and Calvin Harris' international smash We Found Love. The strangest thing about the song though is what happens about two and a half minutes in. So as to apparently not alienate her loyal fanbase with this new commercial dance sound, Heart Hypnotic suddenly transforms into a ballad, the pace slowing down dramatically right through to the end of the song. It's quite an unusual transition and Delta only just about gets away with it, although I wish there was an extended mix that ramped the pace back up, using the slower section as a middle eight before the synths come crashing back in for a storming finish.

Delta's first performance of the song will be on The Voice Australia, on which she's a judge.  She'll be hoping that it's another smash hit, her most recent chart success coming only two weeks ago with Bayini, a collaboration with Australian folk musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, which she also performed on The Voice. Over a decade since Delta first emerged from Neighbours and into the charts, she's still a huge name in Australia and this song will likely win her some new, perhaps younger fans. It's just a shame that her music no longer gets released worldwide, particularly in the UK where her debut album Innocent Eyes sold close to a million copies. Recent singles such as this and Sitting On Top Of The World have the potential to be huge internationally so hopefully somebody soon realises that and makes it happen. In any case, whether Heart Hypnotic is a standalone release or the first single from a fifth album or a greatest hits, it's great to see Delta releasing music regularly again after such a huge gap between her third and fourth albums, it's just a shame that the epic Tori Amos-esque Hunters And The Wolves from last year's Child Of The Universe album is destined to forever sit unreleased as a single.