Waiting Around For Something Bad

All right, let's kick this shit into high gear.

The Bravery, "Fearless" (Richard X remix) - Read any history of dance music and you'll inevitably run into quotes from old-school disco producers decrying the modern remix. Once upon a time, you see, remixing a track meant extending it for the dancefloor, fucking with the breakdown, accentuating elements of the song which got lost in the mix before - but for god's sakes, not reinventing the song entirely like These Damn Kids Today do. I can't say I don't see their point; on a certain level it's incredibly disrespectful to be so dismissive of another artist's efforts, and more often than not it's not a very good sign of the remix's quality (q.v. any DJ Sammy song, probably the only way to get people to stand up for the artistic integrity of Don Henley or Bryan Fucking Adams)

And yet in the hands of people like Richard X, this can be the most refreshing approach to pop music production in the world today. Richard X remixes music like the Slits covered "I Heard It Through The Grapevine": it's all about finding new ways to enjoy something (ostensibly) familiar, in this case transforming a bog-standard nugget of MTV-indie-dance fare into something easily slotted into a playlist between M.I.A.'s "10 Dollar" (an original RX production, incidentally) and Seu George. But the fascinating thing isn't the discrepancy between the two songs - it's the similarity, as Mr. X's production on the remix doesn't ratchet up the drama or slather on the cool or beat you to death with the batshit - the song itself is still in pretty much the same proportions, only now you can have some actual fun dancing to it. (Click here to buy the "Fearless" single from Juno.)

(and of course, music blog bylaws require me to remind you of all of this any time the Bravery are ever mentioned.)

New Rhodes, "I Wish I Was You" - Of course, sometimes bog-standard indie fare can be quite good on its own, thank you. Comparisons to the Strokes are probably inevitable given all this song owes to "Reptilia", but if you're going to copy something, you should probably copy something awesome. (Click here to buy a used copy of the "I Wish I Was You" single from Amazon.co.uk, or click here to order a new copy of their kickass new single "From The Beginning".)

The Cimmarons, "We Are Not The Same" - If a truly great compilation should leave you reeling from your just-dismantled ignorance, then the long-running Soul Jazz % Dynamite! series is seriously one of the great compilation series of all time, not that that's news to anyone who's ever heard any random edition of it. I mean hell, thanks to ska music I was listening to the Skatalites and Desmond Dekker and so on back in high school, so I was well aware that Jamaican musical culture extended past Legend and "Mr. Boombastic" - and yet I can't put on a Dynamite disc without challenging my conception of Jamaican music as a whole. This, for instance, is closer to Motown or than Kingston; they could have handed it off to Brenda Holloway or even Sandie Shaw just as easily and nobody'd have ever been the wiser. But that's Jamaica for you, I guess; the more I learn about it, the more I realize that I have absolutely no idea what's going on there. (Click here to buy %400 Dynamite!, the compilation featuring this song, from Amazon.com)