On last year's Know by Heart, American Analog Set let the lease run out on their droning, 24-hour Farfisy and served up some of the most shyly confident quiet-rock since Yo La Tengo reached their wispy, whispery middle age. The album beckoned sweater weather as it sloped and cooed, sounding as though it had been recorded in the world's sexiest public library. Their new release, a remix EP whose only flaw is its flirtatious length, indentures the soft touch of Know by Heart to huge beats, resulting in some of the flat-out whitest hip-hop remnants this side of Third Bass.
Let's talk about what remixes say about authorship, about the crises they present. Bands are willing to stick their name to material that is technically barely theirs-- in this case, AmAnSet is hocking a project that's mostly the work of Her Space Holiday and Morr Music electronicist Styrofoam-- and about half of these renderings are so cut-and-paste that there's no central text left to eulogize.
So this EP's most obvious misshapen cousin is Low's Owl Remix Low, since it's the most vivid example of what happens when tiptoe-core is turned into turbo-bump, and at least three of these 'updates' (as if they're meant to replace outmoded originals) are insanely similar to those. The slurred loop of American Analog Set's "Desert Eagle" matches the Robitussin booyah of Low's "Anon". The overhaul Know by Heart's title track begins as an ethereal, fragile scritch-scratch of vocal samples (a la Tranquility Bass' take on "Over the Ocean") and bursts into a raving, cyclonic scritch-scratch of vocal samples (a la Jimmy Sommerville's take on "Words").
A recurring motif on the rest of the EP is a 'blown' sound, like equipment failure, that aims to grit up American Analog Set's hypoglycemic poppiness. Another golden crutch the disc flaunts is to juxtapose a high track of busy, busy drum splatterings over a low track of a straight, time-keeping backbeat. Rather than risk being upstaged by its source material's exotic tones, this disc often reduces American Analog Set's initial arrangements to ambient or old school three- and four-note twinkles. "The Postman" sounds like a street brawl between Republic-era New Order, an oscillator, and a caravan of tricked-out Mustangs pumping Miami bass.
Who knows how well this treat will age? Certainly remix albums rank among my CD collection's Golden Girls, or worse, play like bonus features on a wack DVD. But enough textural clashes are chronicled here to keep your attention, and the bombast draws AmAnSet's coyness out of its shell, resulting in a perfect soundtrack for them hours when you know you should be sleeping. Instructions: (1) Get a house with a fireplace for this one, (2) stock up on Duraburn starter logs, (3) flatter a worthy partner, (4) reap the benefits of these ghost-written rave-ups.
