Worst release of 2005. Beyond awful. Listen, I know a lot of people out these parts didn't dig DFA79's mini-metalisms on You're A Woman, I'm A Machine-- too hard, too soft, too boring, not boring enough, vaguely misogynistic, etc. You wrote these things to me and I have all your emails in a file somewhere.
But understand a simple, if not mathematical fact about this two-piece bass-and-drum duo: By necessity their songs have little to them. They're efficient bursts of less-is-more rock that ride riffs hard then cut out right before they stale. I'd have thought at least one motherfucker tapped for this turkey-shot remix project would have figured that out. Instead we get Justice on some reverso Advantage shit, making "Blood on Your Hands" sound like the theme to Super Pitfall, and that game's the fucking worst.
Hey, let's talk Bloc Party's Silent Alarm Remixed, from which we might pretend Romance Bloody Romance took some Ps and Qs. SAR, remember, featured a different producer doing up a different track from the Bloc's debut. Then it came sequenced just like Silent Alarm, and a few of us (me) actually liked it better than the original LP-- more variety, less helicopters, etc. SAR at least made sense, since every Bloc track physically had a bunch of possible reconfigurations. Romance, meanwhile, has four telling remixes of "Black History Month" (the band's worst song), three of "Romantic Rights", an OK new song and a cover of former Peel favorite La Peste's "Better Off Dead". Inexplicably, nobody behind the papers realized after the second or third dude asked to remix "Black History Month" that maybe, maybe, DFA79's songs aren't suited for the full-on remix treatment-- they don't need it either.
Listen, I respect the renewed interest in tripping up rock-kid disco homophobia (still rampant) with these Phoned-in remix blitzes of late. Vice Records, seems, is fighting the good fight. But the Braxe/Falke and Dählback joints here are so flimsy, that vocoder'd out Makuziak futuro-disco bullshit so obnoxiously tongue-in-cheek, I can't imagine anybody really psyched to hit up his neighb Fixed or Making Time party to try out his new Diesel hightops on the dancefloor. Final Fantasy's string arrangements for "Black History" have their charm, sure, but only Trash's Erol Alkan turns in the album's non-bomb, a simple edit of "Romantic Rights" that overlays percussion tracks for an intro and flips the vocal track a disorienting half-step early. Which is saying something: If the game is to make rock tracks playable in clubs, why fuck with them more than you have to? What's so bad about disco edits?
