Is there ever a bad time for Hammertime? If you're listening to the Rescue + Uriah West Remix of Chemars' Feelin' Good EP on Hub City, the answer is hell yes there fucking is. This is a perfectly good remix, pushing the original into grimey loft nirvana and with otherwise terrific vocal samples and a sparse but effective '90s suicide keyboard riff. I love 99% of this: it sounds like something Sneak could write when he was a little buzzed on a chill Sunday afternoon.

But that 1%, that bit that just screws the pooch - that 1% is a sample of MC Hammer's hook from "U Can't Touch This", something that the mind instinctively associates with gigantic silk pants and the rise of radio-friendly Hip-Hop that reigned until the Wu put a bag over its head and beat it with a bat. I could live about 900 years and never hear MC Hammer tell me what the fuck I can touch again and die a very satisfied man. Unfortunately, the remixers think differently and dropped this poison pill into what's seriously a really nice mix - over and over and over again.

(Parenthetically: I remember reading something a few years ago from someone appalled by the heavy sampling in electronic music who wondered what would happen when producers ran out of old hits to sample. This is the end result: a song based on sampling Rick James' "Superfreak", sampled again. Maybe someone will come along and sample this remix and we'll get so meta we'll amuse ourselves to death.)

Now you might think I'm being a dick. You might think that someone can look past this. And if it were a few times, I could probably go right on my merry way and make sweet love to the rest of this boogie track. I'd love it, because the track is just fine on its own and would have been my pick of the release. But I don't have a clue how Mahatma Gandhi can get all peaceful and tolerant and turn the other cheek to 50+ repeated samples of the hook from a song that no one can listen to anymore without taking hostages. The remixers seriously sound so delighted to have fished this bit of pop culture trash out of a multi-platnium piece of industry chum that they just can't help beating you over the head with it over and over. You might as well sample "Five eight eight, two three hundred, Empire! It'd have the same effect.

If you can overlook that much (and you should have gotten the point that it's pretty hard to overlook that much), this is still a solid three track release. The label should have wrapped crime scene tape around the rest of this to keep the remixers at bay because they really screwed a solid overall release. In the absence of my my my my music hits me so hard makes me scream oh my lawd, the original, Hammer-free mix of "Feelin' Good" will have to suffice, and its bumpin' bass and a slower tempo than your average Funky House track makes it easy on the ears. "Mustard Feet" rounds out the release and is a strong track in its own right, with a glitchy beat and a jazzy riff that works well against it.

Chemars, from Romania, has been pushing out a number of solid releases lately (5 reviewer Lydia puts his "Getcha Hustle On" in her crate "labeled 'just muthafukin' good'") and is definitely one to keep an eye on, with cuts on Lowercase Sounds, Dustpan (Singapore) and a few other labels. He's got serious chops and the kind of adventurousness that can devastate genres and blow open the narrow lil categories of music.

Previews
Chemars - Mustard feet - 128 kbs by Chemars

Chemars - Feelin' good - 128 kbs by Chemars

It looks like this isn't up for sale anywhere yet (a search of "Chemars"+"Feelin' Good"+"Hub City" turned up nothing but link to SoundCloud) but more info is probably forthcoming on hubcitymusic.blogspot.com.