Review
Genre and Mood
Chaim and Meital De Razon meet on Love Rehab, house and tech house built like a song. Chaim’s own description of his music is the key: for him, he told Resident Advisor, it is about melodies, about songs. The feelings here, sultry and emotional, come from the critics who heard the track a year later on his album, where Textura found its emotional drama and RA called it smoky.
Song Summary
Love Rehab came out on BPitch Control in 2010 as a three-track single, with New Years Eve and Locations beside it, and De Razon credited as the featured vocalist. This is that original version, seven minutes and forty seconds long. A year later Chaim recorded a new version for his debut album Alive, and every detailed description of the song we could find is of that album cut: Textura heard a French-speaking man’s seductive rasp answered by a woman’s soulful rejoinder, Spectrum Culture an overt nod to Giorgio Moroder that saves the female vocal for a few dramatic lines.
Musical Breakdown
The Groove
No source describes the arrangement of the original single. What the record itself states is its length: at seven minutes forty, about a minute and a half longer than the album version, it has the kind of length that gives a DJ time to mix in and out.
The Voices
The drama the critics describe is a dialogue: a man’s voice with what Textura calls a seductive rasp, and De Razon’s reply. Listen for how the original stages that exchange, and compare it with the album version.
Concepts in Focus
A <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist is a guest credited on another artist’s track. On a producer’s record the guest is usually the voice, and here the voices are what make the track the kind of song Chaim says he cares about. Meital De Razon is a returning collaborator: on Alive she also sings U & Eye.
An alternate version is a second finished recording of the same song by the same artist. Love Rehab has one: Resident Advisor announced that Alive would include a new version of the single, and the album credits it as the Album Version, six minutes long. The two make a useful comparison, the same song shaped once for the club and once for an album.
Artistic Context
Chaim Avital is an Israeli producer from Tel Aviv. Textura tells how electronic music first drifted into his teenage bedroom from parties outside his parents’ home, and how a visit to New York in the late 1990s introduced him to soulful house. Speaking to RA, he traced his sentimental, pop-minded tech house to early raves in Tel Aviv, when the music felt openly euphoric. BPitch Control, the Berlin label also home to Moderat – A New Error, released all of his music from 2008, including Alive on 14 February 2011.
Impact and Reception
Reviewing Alive, Resident Advisor heard the album version of Love Rehab as another canny turn, a smoky mid-tempo rubdown that hooks you with the words. The original came first, and it is among the owner’s most played songs of 2019. Play it, and give it the full seven minutes.
