Review
Genre and Mood
Wax Tailor made Our Dance with the singer Charlotte Savary, and it is the song that carried his debut album out into the world. Wikipedia files that album under trip-hop, downtempo and hip-hop, and Kaffeinebuzz heard it as a darkly melancholy collection; Our Dance is the intimate centre of it, a voice among old records.
Song Summary
Our Dance is the twelfth of eighteen tracks on Tales of the Forgotten Melodies, released on 22 February 2005 on Wax Tailor’s own label Lab’Oratoire and also released by Decon in America and Mole Listening Pearls in Europe. It runs four minutes and twenty-four seconds. Exclaim! described the album as a soundtrack of down-tempo beats with layered instruments and tons of vocal samples, most of it instrumental; Our Dance is one of the songs with a singer, Charlotte Savary of the French band Clover. Kaffeinebuzz heard her surrounded by strange samples and wasping cellos.
Musical Breakdown
No review maps Our Dance part by part, so this review describes less. What the sources give is its texture: a lead vocal by Savary over samples and cellos, in the cinematic, sample-heavy manner of the whole album. Listen for the balance between the singer and the collage behind her.
Concepts in Focus
Wax Tailor’s method is sampling: Tales of the Forgotten Melodies draws on recordings by Nina Simone and Doris Day and on Alfred Hitchcock films, reworked into new music. Our Dance sets a living voice inside that kind of collage, which is why it stands out on an album of mostly instrumental tracks.
Savary is 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 in the classic producer-album sense: the record is Wax Tailor’s, and she is the guest who gives one song its voice. The partnership lasted; she sang on his next albums, from Hope & Sorrow in 2007 to By Any Beats Necessary in 2016.
The song also lives in several versions. The 2006 single Our Dance / Walk the Line added a shorter video and radio edit and remixes by Wax Tailor, Madwreck and Etienne Audureau, and in 2014 he re-scored it for Phonovisions Symphonic Orchestra, an alternate version played by an orchestra. Hear what that treatment did to another song of the same album in Wax Tailor – Que Sera - Phonovisions Symphonic Version.
Artistic Context
Wax Tailor is Jean-Christophe Le Saoût, born in 1975 in Vernon, Normandy, who founded Lab’Oratoire in 1998. Tales of the Forgotten Melodies, recorded between June 2003 and November 2004, was his first full-length album. Charlotte Savary, born in 1979, sang in the bands Clover and Felipecha and later released her solo debut, Seasons, in 2016.
Impact and Reception
British Hip Hop called Our Dance the album’s breakout single, named one of the best singles of the year by Playboy and by iTunes, and described the album itself as a sweeping, cinematic record that critics compared with DJ Shadow and RJD2. Kaffeinebuzz put it somewhere between DJ Shadow, RJD2 and Portishead. Turn the lights down and let the inner voice talk.
