Light and breezy, Au Revoir Simone's synth-pop debut The Bird of Music didn't make a huge splash in 2007, but the Brooklyn trio has nevertheless commissioned a set of remixes. To be fair, Au Revoir Simone aren't treating Reverse Migration as a proper brick-and-mortar release-- it arrives without the usual PR blitz and is available only as a digital download from certain online retailers-- but the album (and others like it, see Stars' disastrous Do You Trust Your Friends?) helps to illustrate the frustrating overabundance of unnecessarily reworked material being hurled at listeners. Want more proof? Take a listen to the bounty of remixes clogging up music-blog aggregators such as Hype Machine and count how few actually move you and how many are there to give bloggers another reason/excuse to keep a band's name in the elbo.ws headlines.
Sadly, the same exercise can be applied here: Despite several high-caliber contributors, Reverse Migration never really gets off the ground. The bulk of its remixers pay too much deference to the source material and wind up with versions that don't enhance their originals. Gothenburg-based electro pop duo Pacific! tries for a Grizzly Bear-ish haunted Americana take on "Sad Song", but their gawky rendering falls flat. Darkel (aka Air's Jean-Benoît Dunckel) puts his lunar spin on "I Couldn't Sleep", isolating the vocals and sprinkling in some "Cherry Blossom Girl" synths, but there's little that's captivating about his mix. And there are a few real stinkers, too: The recreation of "Stars" by New York's Disco Pusher has all of the qualities of a cheap dance remix-- a basic 4/4 backing, cheesy vocoders-- without even a trace of originality to wash them down.
A few musicians do manage to score: Sneering UK party starters the Teenagers turn "Fallen Snow" into a sinister glitch pop track, their adaptation superior to its precedent and a first cousin of Crystal Castles' menacing 2008 juggernaut "Untrust Us". Montag's work on "A Violent Yet Flammable World" is equally intriguing; the French-Canadian producer splits the track in half, adding orchestral touches and lush synths to its back end for a vivid, luminous effect.
The record's lone moment of true inventiveness comes from a likely source, Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, the only artist to use his remix as an opportunity to fabricate an entirely new track. Indeed, his remarkable take on "Sad Song" doesn't share as much a note of similarity to its precursor; Taylor mutilates the track and then reconstructs it as an eight-minute future-pop epic packed with mechanical distortions and flapping, rubbery synths. And when Taylor croons in his geeky, guileless manner, "Play me a sad song... I want you to make me cry", it comes across as more earnest and believable than when ARS breathily told us the same. It's not enough, this song, to pull Reverse Migration out of the why-do-we-need-this pile, but it helps to remind us what a great remix can be-- how, when done properly, it can elevate the source material and reveal new layers to a song we thought we knew. It's funny to be reminded of this while listening to an album that's constantly trying to persuade us otherwise.
