In recent years, everyone from Death From Above 1979 to Architecture in Helsinki to Bloc Party have succumbed to the temptation to create indie remix albums. Now we're faced with Stars' Do You Trust Your Friends?, which we may someday see as the tipping point from indie rock remix albums being idle, indulgent fan-club novelties to becoming inescapable annoyances. Helpfully, it gathers all the transgressions of the trend into one convenient package: incestuous choice of collaborators, unimaginative use of technology, and reconfiguration that uniformly fails to improve on the originals. It also ups the criminal ante by revisiting, track-by-track, an album that's already three years old (Set Yourself on Fire) and splitting the time between flimsy remixes and lazy covers; in other words, Stars has commissioned their own tribute album. The sheer egotism is the most impressive thing about it.
Final Fantasy's leadoff take on "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" sets the tone, lying limply between remix and cover. Preserving Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan's vocals, Owen Pallett fills in the rest with waltzy piano and random string bursts that seem fairly oblivious to the song, sounding more like an audition to be Jon Brion's film-soundtrack intern than a new take on a song that was already more effectively cinematic to begin with. And Pallett's not the only one who utilizes the "hey let's attach the original vocal track to whatever random shit we have lying around" method, as the Most Serene Republic short-circuit the glistening synth-pop of "Ageless Beauty" by layering Millan's singing over an aimless acoustic jam, and the Stills use "Soft Revolution" as a riff-and-solo trashcan, with a horrible pan-flute solo as frosting.
Even when the covers sound less like a band cleaning out their hard drive, the reinterpretations misunderstand Stars' appeal and strengths. Both Apostle of Hustle's slack "One More Night" and the Russian Futurists' breakbeat-and-power-chord "The First Five Times" over-masculinize the sleepy and sensitive Stars sound, while retaining none of their romantic grandeur. Only Broken Social Scene alumnus Jason Collett's top-to-bottom remake of "Reunion" offers any sort of surprising alternate take, turning the song into a ragged, Stonesy number that's far enough afield of Stars' usual M.O. to justify the makeover.
In the actual remix department, there are multiple examples of the most common rearrangement gaffes. Camouflage Nights' "Celebration Guns" and the Dears' "What I'm Trying to Say" (inexplicably split into two parts) both commit the crime of reproduction, with new versions mostly adhering to the originals' structure and sounds and merely moving the sonic furniture around a bit ("hey, what if the chorus drumbeat was the drumbeat for the verses!"). Then there are the tracks that are completely electronified, but to little result, like the Junior Boys' phoned-in "Sleep Tonight", perhaps the most promising (given the Boys' remix know-how), and therefore disappointing, track on Friends. Minotaur Shock (with "The Big Fight") and Metric ("He Lied About Death") at least get a little ambitious, but both leave the oven undercooked, the former rendered somewhat uncomfortable by gallons of empty space, and the latter fixated like a third-grader on the swear-word lyric "don't fuck with our lives" as it runs a psych-loop treadmill.
All together, Do You Trust Your Friends? is an ideal demonstration of why the trend of indie rock remix records should be snuffed out before they becomes industry standard. While we understand the urge to create this kind of stopgap project, either as a way to keep an artist's name in the newswire, a chance to make some extra pocket change with minimal work, or an opportunity to promote some musical pals, as an artistic statement these releases almost uniformly fail to creatively re-imagine any of the source material, only serving to fill the market with inferior versions. Ideally, indie bands will restrict their remixing impulses to B-sides and blog leaks, utilize artists with some experience and talent in the art, and spare us from the feeble, immaterial album-length likes of Friends.
