bloc party - silent alarm remixed
was only a matter of time before the power of the remix was once revealed to be the real area of progress during this current demand for funked up guitars and student pleasing melodies. this album, collects together several limited vinyl only tracks, and displays a whole range of different styles of tracks off the party's debut album, thus exposing the bands willingness to allow their creations to be manipulated and blended into dance culture by well known friends, as well as providing a nice commercial break a few leftfield underground artists. all this, despite the fact that the bands own studio creations are very traditional sounding and according to recent interviews will continue to do so makes for this collision all the more interesting.
the line up of touch up artists is as cool and current as one would expect, so we get erol 'trash' alkan doing his drawn out groove thing to 'she's hearing voices', the ubiquitous paul epworth (producer of the original album) revisits the bands classic 'banquet' and adds some serious disco-funk action thus proving just why he is in such demand, and even m83 going all cinematic ambient with epically gorgeous 'the pioneers'. in fact, it's the ambient retakes that are spread throughout the album that really hit home for me, the clickety smoothness by fourtet is a revelation of melody and wonder, and the post rock gurus mogwai do a very fine job in making a massively reveberbed/echoed bass line totally dominate your headspace 3 and half minutes thereby counteracting the noiseblast of the dfa1979 cover of 'luno' rather nicely.
while a remix album is never essential, this particular release does however make life a lot easier than trawling ebay for those oh-so rare vinyl only tracks for the bands army of many, and even helps project the band into new refreshing sonic territories.
track list/remixer
like eating glass - ladytron
helicopter - whitey
positive tension - jason clark of pretty make graves
banquet - phones
blue light - engineers
she's hearing voices - erol alkan
this modern love - dave pianka
the pioneers - m83
price of gasoline - automato
so here we go - fourtet
luno - bloc party vs dfa1979
plans - mogwai
compliments - nick zinner