Hundred Waters’ excellent 2014 album The Moon Rang Like a Bell felt detached from this present moment in terms of both its sound and its themes; the pace was slow, the production was thick and precise, the lyrics were a mix of surreal observations and vague yearning. It wasn’t so much that its sound scanned as "'90s", though vocalist Nicole Miglis’ debt to Björk in both tone and phrasing sometimes made it feel that way. It was more that the album as an album hearkened back to a slower time, suggesting patience and trust that enough people would want to sit down and let the music wash over them.
Speaking of the '90s, one music trend from the era remembered less than fondly is the remix album. In the second half the decade, when CD sales were on the rise, file sharing was not yet an issue, and electronic music was gaining currency; remixes were, I guess, a way for bands to gain traction with people who were growing accustomed to music samples and sequences. Depending on which label you found yourself on, it became almost expected to follow up a successful album with a collection of remixes. A parallel for Hundred Waters would have been an artist like the Pastels, whose 1998 album Illumination was re-worked a year later as the remix collection Illuminati. The commissioned producers found on that record, including Kid Loco, Cornelius, Stereolab, and John McEntire, were more or less a Who’s Who of the late '90s remix record scene. There are no equivalents to these names in 2015 because in the mp3 era indie rock remixes pretty much lost whatever credibility they once had, as they were (and are) clearly and obviously put together to keep a band’s name active in the online press. A remix included on a real album and pressed to vinyl at least pretends to matter; one blasted with a press release with new tour dates is forgotten almost immediately.
Hundred Waters released Moon on Skrillex’s OWSLA imprint. But despite presumably easy access to EDM bass-drop royalty, no one here tries to turn their songs into teeth-grinding summer festival anthems. And Plaid aside, the remixers lean obscure. Brandt Brauer Frick turns "Murmurs" into a dark, throbbing bit of noir with a two-step break, Shigeto strips "Cavity" back to just voice and thumb piano to beguiling effect, and Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches does his thing to "Broken Blue", basically sounding like he put a boombox in the window of his apartment, hit Play, and recorded the sound from across the room. Those are all highlights. Illangelo’s "Confessional Remix" of "Innocent", on the other hand, with its pitch-shifted "ghostly R&B" vocals, sounded dated before he’d saved the .wav file on his computer. There are also three re-works by the band themselves. The opening "Show Me Love" is one of the set’s best moments, featuring just Miglis and piano, while "No Sound" gets an awkward arrangement from the band’s Paul Giese and Zach Tetreault including a surge of brass at its close. Trayer Tryon’s "Seven White Horses" is the record’s one stab at dance music proper, amplifying the original’s stuttering rhythm and adding a 4/4 kick, and it’s mostly a mess.
Even with its weak points, The Moon Rang Like a Bell (Remixed) is charming in part because of the sincerity with which it's presented. The remixes are sequenced in the same order as the album proper, for one, suggesting that it is meant to be absorbed as a whole. There are no repetitions of individual tracks, and for the most part, the remixes are low-key and tasteful, hewing closely to the group’s preferred mode, suggesting an "alternate version" of the record more than a mishmash collection of promo detritus. All of which combines to make The Moon Rang Like a Bell (Remixed) an unlikely album that is much better than it could have been, even if, ultimately, its utility as an album is less clear. Will I ever reach for this over the original? Never. But it’s not impossible to imagine someone out there doing so once in a while. Which for a remix album is about as good as it gets.
