Back in 1992, a young Chicago music producer called Curtis A. Jones got together with a young singer called Karen Gordon – who usually went by the stage name of Dajaé. They made a track together called “Brighter Days” – Jones did a few versions whilst also roping in Todd Terry and Louie Vega to provide remixes.

Since then, it’s become one of the most well known house music tracks for anyone who can be bothered looking past “Show Me Love”. A few official remixes have come out over the years – the Seamus Haji and Paul Emanuel one from 2005 is something of a favourite for our team – but the Underground Goodie mix from the original is probably still the most well known.

So when Ears To The House noticed that a few new remixes had emerged recently to celebrate the song’s 30th anniversary, it was inevitable we were going to have a closer look. Marco Lys provides a new version – which tops the Traxsource chart at the time of publication – and DJ E-Clyps supplies two. And what’s our verdict?

To sum up in a succinct manner, we really wish we hadn’t bothered. The consensus is that Marco Lys gives us a tech-house by numbers take – the kind of thing played by a lot of DJs who used to play good music, but who now gravitate towards tech house to improve their fees. We’re inclined to be kinder towards the DJ E-Clyps mixes, especially the Blacklight one – but even these feel like there’s something missing.

We fully understand why these mixes have come out, though – analysis done by this site under our previous guise revealed that numerous entries in the Traxsource Top 200 for last year were covers and remixes. When Traxsource reveal this year’s results in the next two to three weeks, we predict similar trends will be spotted pretty quickly.

Someone somewhere is already working on a cheap cash-in of a hit they had in 1993, mark our words…