In a different year Single Frame's Everything Wants to Be Used for What It Was Made For might be seen as another slipshod remixes and rarities comp, necessary as Crystal Pepsi and far less refreshing. But in 2K6, mixtapes reign supreme, and rock's curiosity-stirring, gluttonous-musical-appetite-sating answer can only be the slipshod remixes and rarities comp. The shoe fits here, rest assured, but amid geysers of thinkpieces praising Papoose's prolificacy and Purple City's anti-establishment ethos, 40 minutes of odds'n'sods from Austin's little-heard Single Frame seems somehow more acceptable.
Of course, rap tapes are all economics-- dudes circumventing their labels' highway robbery by selling out of trunks and pocketing quick, untaxed bucks. Rock bands' compilations ofremixes/demos/B-sides/covers? Not so much. Million-selling DJ Drama's "fuck you" is Volcom Entertainment's "fuck us," really, because (let's be real) no one gives a shit. Typically, 99 out of a 100 are built around a couple of album-caliber castaways the band can't find a home for elsewhere; the rest is filler or worse.
Content to commingle its wheat with its chaff, Everything Wants to Be... constitutes no appreciable challenge to that status quo. Full-stacked gutterpunk greyhound race "Taken For a Walk (Unreleased Dimeshot)" combats suburban ennui right alongside the flimsier, quasi-industrial "Silver Crime Lining (Abandoned Demo)". Then, like a surly goth kid sheepishly phoning in his second middle school bomb threat, "Exact Copy (Witch Dr. Remix)" does the industrial thing again, this time atop a chord progression totally stolen from Doom II.
"Floral Design in a Straight Line" was the first song I ever heard from these guys, and it remains their most exciting moment. But J-Mprint's remix treads with caution, opting for a bland, vocal-free continuation instead of blowing the thing open. An acousticized "Post Daydream (First Day Demo)", meanwhile, sacrifices the explosive album version's quarter-life-crisis emotional depletion ("Reality sticks and your dreams fade away," "The people are deceitful and mean," "You're 23 today, happy birthday," etc.) for bedroom tears. There's a Nick Zinner remix of "People Are Germs", which thoughtlessly weds garbled zombie moans to a grimy trance beat. And then (lo!) there's this collection's one truly awesome song. Sounding like a realist M83, "Digital Witness (Protection Remix)" smears Belong's dewey guitar drone over a crouton of SOP house thumps and cathected vocals ("Nothing to say/ Nowhere to be/ This time"). I mean, yeah, we can go on about the disappointment inherent to "these things," but does a good song ever really need an excuse to be heard?
