It's just what it sounds like: A track-by-track remix of Bloc Party's awfully solid debut, as executed by a selection of reasonably big names and reasonably reliable artists. On the other hand, it's not at all what it sounds like: It's actually really good. Surprisingly good, and surprisingly often-- good enough that I spent half of my first listen wondering if I was really going to wind up giving it a better rating than the original. Weird, right?
Maybe I shouldn't act so shocked. It's just that something's gone wrong with the rhetoric around the word "dance" lately. Suddenly it's considered perfectly normal to say any given uptempo guitar band from north of the English Channel is some kind of "dance" group, something that just isn't true according to anything but mid-sixties standards. ("Hey look, it's popular dance combo the Dave Clarke Five!") Bloc Party may have a pretty good rhythm section, but that doesn't exactly make them Masters at Work, does it? But wouldn't you expect the fashion of the day to dictate that their occasional hustles get remixed and extended out into a series of faux bangers, something to throw on when the club's mysteriously overrun with indie kids and you need a cheap way to get them on the floor?
And here's the trick: The best of these remixes don't even dream of that. The best of these remixes use beats as not much more than a grid around which to reorganize the raw sounds of the original tracks-- a frame around which to tweak the sound of Bloc Party into something a little more fractured and abstract. It's Sheriff Whitey's mix of "Helicopter" that seals the deal. Instead of the sound of Bloc Party lushed up and given groove, we get the sound of some alternate-world Bloc Party, one that's more interested in rocking spare and spindly, like Wire, than their usual habits of scripting professional-sounding twists and turns. When I reviewed Silent Alarm, I said that being a good ol' unchallenging rock band was this group's biggest strength; for the length of this mix, it sounds like they've traded in a little of the "ol'" and the "unchallenging." For a few stretches of tracks, it's a best-case scenario: all of the hot performances and satisfying hooks without the slight aftertaste of plain-old-band boredom.
So it's really only a lull in the middle that keeps it from topping the original, and even that gets redeemed fairly quickly. A surprisingly-limp Erol Alkan mix gets followed up by what might be the best thing here: Dave P. and Adam Sparkles making a sunny 80s number out of "This Modern Love", complete with handclaps and some synths at the end that leave the whole thing feeling like the Cure jamming out on "Just Like Heaven". (Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs leaves "Compliments" sounding like a whole other Cure, actually.) It's the same trick again-- it sounds like something some bizarro version of the group might actually play, if they'd just chill out for a second and stop trying to be so damned grand.
Others try to isolate just that grandness. Ladytron push the vocals from "Like Eating Glass" way back into the ether, behind a tense, unchanging thrum, for an effect that's like walking out of your apartment and thinking you can hear Bloc Party playing a festival six blocks over. (Black Strobe's typically grim-as-hell floor-crushing mix of this song might have been more exciting, but we have a theme to work here.) M83, a group whose formula is as easy to predict (and as hard to fake) as Boards of Canada's, wrap the vocals from "The Pioneers" around a long sweep of synths and strings. "Luno" gets drawn furthest from the original aesthetic, thanks to Death from Above 1979 laying in a big buzzy heap of their own hard-rock scuzz. Closest to the expected rock-gone-dance template is DFA associate Phones' old remix of "Banquet", which works just like it's supposed to (i.e., wouldn't mix so strangely with "You Spin Me Round"); closest to the pop-gone-remix template is Four Tet's chimes-to-drones take on "So Here We Are", more M83 than M83, and smack in that Superpitcher-remixes-Postal-Service sweet spot.
Surprise: It's all a good fit with the sound of the original. It's Bloc Party's old-fashioned "every track a single" aesthetic that makes this project possible; it's their hyper-ambitious "Technicolour" recording and ultra-precise performances that give the remixers so much sharp material to work with. After a few months with the original, you could start to feel like Kele Okerere was trying a little too hard to fill his vocals with non-stop passion, but here it's a boon-- grab any snippet of singing and it's ready to isolate, ready to wail. So the band makes a rock-solid professional-sounding pop/rock record, and here come some folks with their computers to make it a bit more formally interesting as well: not a bad deal at all, right?
