And The Weird Thing Is, I Can't Stand "Sister Ray"

New Order, “I Told You So” (3 Mix) – I’m actually a little worried for this song; it’s produced by Jacques Lu Cont (yes, yet another goddamned moniker – maybe this is how he punishes his fans for giving away all his music for free), so I doubt it’s in any danger of being ignored by the Quality Determining Establishment At-Large, but as you’ll come to appreciate within five seconds of listening to it for the first time, it’s so drastically different from any of his other remixes – and I mean any of them – that I can easily see long-winded blowhards talking all the fun right out of this song (*cough*). So right off the bat, let’s get this straight: the best reason to listen to this song isn’t because it’s bleeding-edge or because you couldn’t possibly expect it to sound like it sounds, but rather simply because it’s a nice little slab of psychedelic pop no matter who’s involved with its creation. Admittedly, it’s not a kill-yr-kids masterpiece of the genre, of course – as undeniable as its charms may be, it’s just as undeniably a remix of an eminently skippable album cut done in a style by someone I know and love as Disco Stuart – but fuggit; sometimes a song just has to not suck.

That being said, I wouldn’t dream of kidding myself into thinking that the most fun part of this song is anything other than getting to explain it to everyone – I doubt Jacques Fucking Lu Cont would have gone out of his way to turn an alleged New Order dancehall-y track into a “We Will Fall”-era Iggy number if that weren’t at least partly the point. The funny thing is that if you’re like me and prefer dicking around on the internet to things like “living a fulfilling life” and “finding a reason to keep the shotgun out of my mouth”, it’s not really even that much of a surprise; even a cursory glance at the tracklisting for Lu Cont’s Blueprint compilation from a few years back should be enough to pick up on some mindfuckery like the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” or 808 State’s “Techno Bell”. And, thinking about it, I guess it makes sense that that kind of sound would inform Lu Cont’s work – after all, the man only pays as much attention to the way the sounds in his productions move through sonic space and how that affects the listener more than anyone since, fuck, Martin Hannett? Lee Perry? I mean, fuck, you’ve all heard the Starsailor remix – isn’t that really just a statelier and more dancefloor-effective John Cale track at its heart?

But here’s the thing: the more I listen to the “I Told You So” remix, the less inclined I am to think of it as a statistical outlier in his otherwise-consistent work. Just because it’s a different sort of sturm und drang doesn’t make it any less of a dramatic tour-de-force than, say, that (godawesome) remix he did for the (godawful) Music; it may not be beating you over the head with its pleasures, but if you read that pitched-up synth that pays off with the final chorus as anything other than the old “JLC wringing every drop of serotonin out of this song” trick, you should probably pay closer attention. I get the feeling that Lu Cont (and most other producers worth their salt) typically enters into a production project the way I sit down to make a mix CD – I mean, lord knows I’ve got a formula, to the point where anyone who’s ever gotten more than one mix CD from me can probably tell you with disastrous accuracy what the last song’s going to sound like, but I have my formula because it feels organic, like I’ve found a way to listen to music to make sense out of a lot of stuff I’d otherwise probably just consume, shit out, and walk on by. Well, Jacques Lu Cont’s productions typically feel like that to me, and the fact that here he’s “explaining” a genre he’s never otherwise directly brought up (and which I’d otherwise never actively seek out) offsets a lot of “I Told You So”’s inherent (albeit minor) sins of mediocrity.

But the Coldplay mix – now THAT’s something special. (The 3 remix of “I Told You So” will be out soon on New State Records, but in the meantime, click here to buy Waiting For The Siren’s Call from Amazon.com)

Lindstrom & Prins Thomas, “Mighty Girl” – I don’t even want to think about how much more I’d like this song than just about anything else, and certainly any of these newfangled space-disco numbers, if it only had some vocals. That’s not to say it’s not perfectly fine on its own, mind you; I don’t want to live in a world where I’m too stupid to appreciate friggin’ Lindstrom and Prins friggin’ Thomas cramming eighty-five tons of the most gorgeously blasé Baelerixxx into one song, although fortunately the piano loop that drives the whole song borders on unmissable so we probably don’t have to worry about that. It’s just that all this space-disco stuff sounds so organic that it almost sounds incomplete to my ears without the presence of humanity – think of it as the other side of the coin from all those Paradise Garage records where the vocals are, in a word, Christ-punchingly awesome but the actual tracks just kinda exist. The only thing we can really know for certain is that someone somewhere is going to slip the acapella of “No Scrubs” (or possibly “Independent Women”) over this one, and they’re going to see a lot of people suddenly get really happy the first time it goes out over the speakers. (The “Mighty Girl” single is scheduled for release later this month; click here to pre-order it from Soul Seduction)

ELSEWHERE

- I’m not going to post it since I already posted the original a few months ago, but seriously y’all, somewhere out there on the internet right now, copies are available to be found of the DFA’s remix of Tiga’s “Far From Home”, and I swear by everything that’s holy that you – YES YOU, RANDOM GOOGLER LOOKING FOR THE NAME OF THE SAMPLE USED IN “STAY FLY” – are going to melt into a 98.6 degree puddle for this one. I haven’t heard everything the DFA’s ever produced, but I’ve heard a lot, and I don’t have a problem putting the full force of my exposure to them behind the statement that the breakdown smack in the middle of the “Far From Home” remix may well be the most awesomely effective thing they’ve ever done – they’ve been taking their cues from “proper” (read: deeply mortifying to indier-than-thou douchebags) dance music for a while now, but I don’t know if they’ve ever come this close to full-on blissed-out euphoria before; it just keeps swirling and building and these glittering new synths come in and it’s ten minutes long and my iTunes says I’ve listened to it eleven times already and I just heard it for the first time yesterday. I’d like to think that, along with that Hot Chip remix from a few months back, this is basically the DFA template for this year (kinda like how that Jon Spencer Blues Explosion remix was the template for last year) – I mean god would I ever like to think that. Unbelievable stuff. Start saving yr money for those remix comps now, or in the meantime start checking the Hype Machine obsessively for the low-quality rip to surface like the rest of us. You won’t be sorry.