Songs Like Heaven or Las Vegas — Measuring a Song Nobody Can Quote
By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-09-09
Most recommendation systems lean on words — lyrics, tags, reviews, what people say about a record. Heaven or Las Vegas defeats all of that, because almost nobody can tell you what it says. That makes it an unusually clean test of a method that never reads lyrics in the first place.
The reading
Intensity 45 out of 100, dynamic range 7, 118 BPM, mild sudden changes, layered texture. We tag it calm, contemplative and transcendent. Four records match the first three figures almost exactly, and they come from four unrelated corners of music.
- Unfinished Sympathy — Massive Attack, 1991. Intensity 45, dynamic range 7, 120 BPM.
- Plastic People — Four Tet, 2003. Intensity 45, dynamic range 7, 120 BPM.
- Niobe — Caribou, 2010. Intensity 45, dynamic range 7, 120 BPM.
- Black Magic Woman — Carlos Santana, 1970. Intensity 45, dynamic range 7, 120 BPM.
The wider band, one point down
- Everybody Wants to Rule the World — Tears for Fears, 1985. Intensity 44, dynamic range 7, 116 BPM.
- Enjoy the Silence — Depeche Mode, 1990. Intensity 44, dynamic range 7, 113 BPM. Released the same year, and the closest neighbour in both time and sound.
- Feels Like We Only Go Backwards — Tame Impala, 2012. Intensity 44, dynamic range 7, 110 BPM.
- Strange Mercy — St. Vincent, 2011. Intensity 44, dynamic range 7, 110 BPM.
What the test showed
The band our numbers picked out is coherent in a way that would be hard to argue with: eight records that move at a walking-pace clip, travel a long way dynamically, and never jolt. Santana in 1970 and Caribou in 2010 genuinely do share that behaviour.
What the numbers could not find is the thing the record is actually famous for — a voice used as an instrument, meaning deliberately withheld. No figure on this page encodes that, and none of these eight reproduce it. A lyrics-blind method is not penalised by an unintelligible vocal, but it is not rewarded either. It simply never knew the vocal was the point.
Figures are our own measurements, read from the public API at build time. The genre and era spread is a consequence of measuring sound rather than style — it is not a claim that these artists resemble each other in any other way. No lyrics are reproduced.