100% agree the comments on the beats. Why are 90% modern tracks like this, It's so frustrating. The beautiful synths, pads and pianos in this track is what should be shining through the forefront but instead its dominated by the beats, which are also too polished and robotic in contrast to the balaeric 'human' music behind them. Make these beats softer/oldschool and you have one of the nicest melodic progressive house tracks of the year.
Sometimes we wanna be stuck in the past if the music has that kinda soul..for sure this type of old school formula deserves an old school beatwork to make the track breathe a bit as it goes along various different avenues, the beats use to follow the melody throught out different section/changes in the track but with recent stuff it's almost non existent apart from select few artists / releases.
I'd say the type of sound we truely desire might be seen as a bit imperfect/warm sounding given todays standards compared to the current version of the end product, which indeed sounds too polished on the beats side, its like they're afraid to go all the way back to their older styles to capture that true essence for the real forum/reddit type audience to pass it as TOTY and not forgotten about in few months/years time, as it should have those inviting characteristics baked into it basically a fail safe mechanism-realism-soul for the beats structure and it
should be well thought out/cleverly arranged to accompany the melody and the rest of the tracks sections.
(Btw at the same time this was my attempt at translating Daysleeper/Nightclapper, mines, yours and few other users anger/frustration towards todays music standards basically a mashup of rants, sometimes i feel like expressing the frustration others are also experiencing like the Key & peele obama anger translator episode lol, because so many of us are saying the same things over and over again and its like no ones listening and the sound keeps on becoming overly polished as time passes which sometimes may even be perceived as thin bodied compared to full bodied like the older releases aka the golden era, perhaps its an issue with the new mixing/mastering or compression or sidechain related techniques or its daw related or an issue with the shift towards high res sound, could even be anything or mixture of all or nothing at all sadly, guess people like us are forever stuck in the past as they say).
The source of the problem that changed everything?:
* Photographer - Airport (I think I hate this track now, this track alone shifted the whole scene and turned it upside down, the curse of the 140bpm steroids & templates, essentially giving unintentional birth to the current era of dozens of souless carbon copies).