There are way too many remixes in circulation these days. Upstart producers rework anything they can get their hands on to get noticed, and bands that are only vaguely connected to dance culture commission whole albums of DJ edits. Most of this stuff is decent at best. But Hot Chip are different. The London electro-pop group has a dance-music pedigree as strong as anyone and are prolific, talented remixers in their own right. (They've reworked cuts by Matthew Dear, Junior Boys, M.I.A., Amy Winehouse, and many others.) A Hot Chip remix record is actually worth getting excited about.
This EP lets folks have a go at tracks from Hot Chip's recent One Life Stand album, and the band brings in some heavy hitters to do the job. House hero Todd Edwards, Caribou's Dan Snaith, and techno hotshot Osborne are a few of the guys on deck. It's an interesting task for these producers, though, because One Life Stand isn't the most dancefloor-ready Hot Chip record. There's propulsion behind it, sure, but OLS is fundamentally a poignant work-- it's lush and romantic and even ballad-driven at times. So the challenge here is to preserve these songs' emotional weight while pushing them in a bouncier direction.
Most of the remixers choose to highlight the optimistic elements of the source material and stretch what are ostensibly pop songs into extended house jams. Naturally, Edwards does a great job of this with his take on "Hand Me Down Your Love", turning the drum-and-piano driven original into a glittery seven-minute floor filler. British newcomer Hot City offers more futuristic house on his "We Have Love" remix and pretty much knocks it out of the park, too. It's a wild track: ultra-fast bpm and violently wobbly bass, the thing just jumps out of your speakers. Pretty easy to see why this guy's seen a lot of hype recently.
Some of the other producers take a more nuanced approach, deconstructing songs rather than just amplifying them. Osborne's "Take It In" remix does this really well. He's got a knack for mechanized funk and basically turns the steely original into a gooey slow jam that drips with emotion. Caribou's "Brothers" re-do is the only thing here I'm not crazy about. Admittedly Snaith's got his work cut out for him since this is one of Hot Chip's strongest, most evocative tracks. He makes it sound watery and kind of ethereal, puts lots of reverb on the vocals, and it sounds appealing but ultimately lacks the passion of the original.
That's the lone misfire here, though. All the other remixes give Hot Chip's source tracks a cool companion piece. (Which is an important point-- nobody here tries to improve on the originals, just taking them in a different direction.) Obviously some of the credit goes to the band. These guys could have their pick of producers, but they carefully choose people who would steer the material in interesting directions. It's a little like making a good mixtape-- you need a thematic thread running throughout but plenty of variety between songs. Both of those things happen here, and it's just another reason Hot Chip are so good at what they do.
