When you’re one of the most influential labels in modern music, inspiring guitar bands and bedroom producers alike; when your own band, LCD Soundsystem, have released an album that captures your label’s philosophy clinically in one relentless discofied pulse; when you’ve single-handedly made grizzly jowls acceptable in a world that held Casablancas and Flowers as its icons (well, Doves tried, but… ); when you’re one of the most sought after remix teams currently breathing your charmed life into other people’s music; when you’re, in short, James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy, then you can be forgiven almost anything. Even this.
Not that there’s anything they’ve particularly wrong here – it’s just that, problematically, remix collections are so often the preserve of the DJ. These 9 tracks do little to buck that trend: nice and easy to fade in on the decks, but a lot of wasted listening time if you’re just throwing it on start to finish. It’s like on their dubbed-out reworking of Gorillaz’ ‘Dare’: head-rush waves of squealing synths bully our senses – but how long do we wait for them? The same happens with the circling-yet-belated acid keys of the mix of Soulwax’s ‘Another Excuse’, or the terminally minimal house we have to cope with before John Spencer’s guitar roars into life on the reworking of his band’s ‘Mars Arizona’. Of course, in the midst of a DJ set, you wouldn’t hear half of these percussive loop-fests, so it seems overly-academic to grumble, but it’s a fair bet that most people buying the CD will be doing so with the intent to sit through the whole thing.
In terms of out-and-out bollocks, only Fischerspooner’s ‘Emerge’ is totally drained of blood by the duo – everything else is littered with some saving shards of shattered mirrorball that could only be the calling card of an act of DFA dance-floor terrorism. In particular, their remixes of Le Tigre and Metro Area are liquid-cool jets of robot-funk, while their synthetic orchestration of U.S. label mates Hot Chip’s ‘(Just Like We) Breakdown’ is possibly as good as anything committed to record by either party. At times like this, their futurist slant on ‘80s new wave and disco seems almost peerless.
But to add some perspective: there is new material due this year from most of the DFA roster, including no less than albums from The Rapture, Black Dice and Murphy and Goldsworthy’s own LCD Soundsystem. The real shit, basically. It’s this kind of promise that allows us to indulge the pair as they present this occasionally sublime yet mostly middling set of remixes as a worthy representation of the DFA name. Death From Above? More a mildly pestilent spring shower.
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