Part of what's disappointing about Night Light, the companion remix album to Au Revoir Simone's Still Night, Still Light, is that it takes everything implicit about the band's music and makes it explicit. With other artists, this might be a good thing-- and certainly the project of "remixing a band" is all about making room for an outside vision to suss out a song's hidden impulses, unexplored angles, buried hooks, latent possibilities, and so on-- to get that coveted and aerating "perspective." Sometimes, this works out well (listen to the Tanlines remix of "Shadows", mysteriously not included here). But for the most part, Au Revoir Simone's three-girl synth-pop is already such an elegant synthesis of different styles that their remixes-- and at this point, nearly three-quarters of their catalog has been remixed-- are like hearing a joke dismantled: They do little for the joke and even less for the person telling it.
In that sense, the fact that Night Light is all over the place is a testament to how good Still Night, Still Light is. People remixing these tracks are hearing chipper club-pop, Francophilic variety-show music, disco-lite, and bedroom chorales. (For eight minutes, we even get to hear Au Revoir Simone as dubstep, and let me tell you that it is a merciless eight minutes.) Part of what makes Still Night, Still Light replayable is how discreet it is in pooling its influences together. The remixes, then, tell me things I already knew: one, that Au Revoir Simone are subtly reminiscent of a whole lot of different styles, which is a big part of why they have a smart and coherent vision as artists; and two, that all that subtlety is a big part of what made me love them in the first place.
A note on subtlety: I know that this band can come off as cute and antiseptic, and for a few years I was much more interested in where their dresses came from than what their music sounded like. But between The Bird of Music and Still Night, their poise became refined to the point of eerie-- it was like watching someone walking with a library book on her head for an hour instead of thirty seconds. Their lyrics took a similar turn: All of a sudden, they were singing metaphor-free confrontations like, "I'm moving on/ I hope you're coming with me/ Because I'm not strong without you," or, "Oh joy! I can see you/ It's all I want"-- lines so direct that they left no room to run from-- in pretty, unison harmony. In short, their minuses became plusses.
The contributors to Night Light are a mix of people I had trouble finding out much about even after Googling (Bass Clef? Your Twenties?) and people I didn't (Neon Indian, Jens Lekman). One thing the higher-profile contributors have in common is that they're not known for their remixes. My guess is that most of them are friends, whether from living in Brooklyn (the Dirty Projectors' Deradoorian; Neon Indian) or from sharing an aesthetic sensibility (Jens Lekman; Montag). And to be fair, a few of these are pretty good, especially Lekman's (who takes the formerly driving "Shadows" and turns it into lilting, Hollywood jazz) and Clock Opera's quasi-tropical version of "Tell Me", which practically writes a new melody with fragments of the old one. To my ears-- which have heard the originals a hundred times-- the ones that work out work out because they're both unexpected and careful.
After a tour-only remix EP and a full album of remixes for The Bird of Music, Night Light feels like an unnecessary product. I know, I know, the whole concept of musical "product" is increasingly out of date, and the low returns and inevitable piracy of music actually makes flooding the market a semi-reasonable thing to do. As it is, Au Revoir Simone have about the most unpredictable, accessory-like cultural existence a band from Williamsburg could have: Almost nobody I know listens to them, but they've been on "Grey's Anatomy" and "Ugly Betty"; David Lynch is a fan; they play fashion shows; and I once saw a poster of theirs in the window of an Agnès B. shop at an upscale mall in Hong Kong. Still, with an album as good as Still Night, Still Light, there's no reason to sully the brand.
