Devyn’s “Feeling Alive” comes as a melodic meeting of rap and hip hop. The verses offer a detailed account of the track’s concept and the experiences that led to the storytelling. There’s a lot of lyricism, the verses have the extended length of rap, yet this echoed melody used to express it adds a certain alternative edge that gives the track character.
The backing track showcases a structurally thoughtful piece of music that again fuses the thickness of a mellow hip-hop beat and the electric energy of a synth driven wave of riffs. The opening few bars of music and indeed the final few moments re-iterate the clever use of structure within the production. The leading artist’s vocal performance on top of the mix however is the primary driving force behind the song and its sentiment, and it’s this that you’re likely to take away from the experience after listening.
Within each minute of music, the sound is both manic and calm, gentle and heavy, progressing through the artist’s creative story-line with an attitude of rap and an underlying softness of hip-hop. What adds to the intrigue of it a great deal is the presence of lyrics. The leading voice sampled throughout has a distinct level of passion and urgency, this is in both the performance and the words chosen to express these ideas. The vocal, on many occasions, addresses a certain other directly, amidst mildly descriptive imagery and a few key lines that surround you in a fairly hypnotic manner.
The beat is muffled and distant, soon evolving into something much more crisp and cool, and all the while this ambient wave of sound flows out and around you, seemingly from every corner of the room. There are some sublime moments of detail within the mix that really draw your focus in varying directions. Structurally, this evolution is consistent and ever interesting, though for the purpose of maintaining the mood, the sentiment of the song; there are one or two threads that remain intact – carrying the essence of the piece and keeping you contained within this particular world of expression, however vast it becomes.
