Pattern Is Movement
Daytrotter Session - Apr 9, 2009
- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Crazy In Love
Sometimes people that you think you know decently well keep secrets from you. They might not be deep and dark, secrets that are utterly shameful and reprehensible, but they’re pieces of information about them that would be interesting to know. They would be factoids and good ice breakers, no matter how old the relationship/friendship happens to be. What we’re mostly talking about is when someone you spend a lot of time with suddenly exclaims that they are related to Elvis Presley or Jesse James. You know, something like that. You always ask for proof, but never get it. You’re forced to just swallow the knowledge whole, like a boa constrictor taking that rat in one end and down the slow conveyor belt to the tail. Pattern Is Movement have been keeping something from us, all of us, and while we’re at it, Beyonce – you little minx – you’ve been doing the same damned thing. Though she didn’t allow the full experience of her original version of “Crazy In Love,” which she wrote with her now-husband Mr. Jay Z and Rich Harrison, we’re fortunate to have the generosity of Christopher Ward and Andrew Thiboldeaux here, willing to accentuate where the original inspiration of the “sassy” masterpiece came from. Beyonce must have been in cahoots with the one and only John Carpenter, as a ghostwriter on this particular tune. The sentiments that Ward and Thiboldeaux summon from the seemingly innocuous, but jammin’ song about out-of-the-head infatuation (probably inflamed by a roll or two in the old sheets) could have been plucked from the premise for “Halloween,” the 1978 horror classic written and directed by Carpenter, whereby high schoolers getting their foolin’ around on for the first time and chucking their virginity into the fire are thereby getting themselves slashed to hell in a potpourri of ways by a creep in a hockey mask. Well, that’s an awful lot of presumption, but as the Pattern duo started exploring the song, with the aid of an Antony and the Johnsons cover of the one and the same, they seem to have consulted the muse of Carpenter even more, bringing into the song more and more of the dark and stormy, terrorizing kind of night. There are demons cooking the words in a cauldron, while there’s still enough reason to pull some club moves out of the legs and pelvis. It’s wrong not to shake it a little still, but all of the banging needs to be done with an ear to the night and what could be lurking around the corner or down the hall. It has the feeling of Jamie Lee Curtis moving through a dark house, scared out of her shirt, or picking up a telephone call late at night and hearing nothing but heavy breathing on the other end. This crazy in love is just plain psychotic and it’s one of the more entrancing remakes of a pop song that’s been done in quite some time, bringing out in it such drastically different moods. This love is one to be somewhat frightened of and who knows what the crazy bastard under its influence is capable of. Could be something or it could be nothing, a startlingly desperate crush or something very serious. All that’s really known is that there is a prowl that is taking place and there’s a need to come to terms with the idea that not all of this is healthy. Ward, Thiboldeaux and honorary third member for the day, Brian Dwyer, proved that on a bitter cold day in January, with the chill of Carpenter’s spirit a palpable force in the room – their phantom friend.