This is not your usual remix album. Where most remix artists take the original material and make it stranger, more complex, and funkier, the producers and instrumentalists who were invited to reinterpret five tracks from
Public Record's debut album seem to have a completely different agenda in mind: while a couple of them have upped the funk ante, most of them have taken the original songs and made them stranger, simpler, and more abstract. Perhaps the most extreme example of that impulse is found in
Fugazi frontman Guy Picciotto's version of "Fall of the Fruit," which is reduced to a dark and creepy collage of foreboding drums, whines, and drones.
Portastatic's take on "Heavy Ornament" turns it into a grooveless thumb-piano chorale; Quentin Stoltzfus' mix of "Fall of the Fruit" manages somehow to be simultaneously dubby, quiet, and noisy -- a rare and strange achievement. On the funkier side are both the Solus and Kevin Diehl mixes of "French Suburb," and on the somewhat disappointing side are Alasdair MacLean's whispery, whistling mix of "Fall of the Fruit" and Mark Robinson's drearily pulsing mix of "Mermaid's Purse." Perhaps the best and easily the strangest track on this album is Arc in Round's remix of "Comfortability," in which a stomping, martial beat is nearly overpowered by swarms of tiny glitches and stabbed by serrated guitars, then suddenly towered over by majestic horns. ~ Rick Anderson