I'm glad you wrote about this--I didn't even know there was a remix album.

Pitchfork pisses me off a lot, if only because I suspect that about 75% of every review is total nonsense. That said, I'm enjoying both Kanye's new album and the New Pornographers' new one, and they both got high marks (probably too high for Kanye--9.5???).

yeah -- I primarily use the site for its "best new music" section, which is usually pretty spot-on. The lower-profile reviews are pretty hit-or-miss, though.

If I see the phrase "freakfolk" once more (I'm including earlier in this sentence), I'm going to have to go back to chicago and kill some people. Also pitchfork reviews are rarely well-written, etc. But your complaints about remixes really mostly applies to bad remixes, no? There's a remix album of David Sylvian's Blemish called The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter that, despite the name, is very good.

In contexts like this, electronic music is to rock and roll as Hooked on Phonics is to literature.

Rockist! I'm not sure how "In contexts like this" modifies the claim that follows, but nevertheless there's quality artistic electronic music. Amon Tobin is the only electronic guy I excited over, but I do get genuinely excited about him.

But the Pitchfork claim you quote is weird. It's not as if any guitar riff springs forth into the world wholly formed—album production involves some folks with their computers who make songs a bit more formally interesting. These are just different folks doing different computer things.

I meant "contexts like this" to mean situations where the building materials are mostly limited the pieces of an already-constructed rock song.

I don't mean to claim all electronic music is bad -- it's not the genre I know the most about, but I've heard stuff I like a lot, and I'm sure there's much more out there (although it seems like in all of music, house may be the genre with the most laughably untalented artists at its top). And like I said, I like this remix album.

But "greater than the sum of its parts" is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to remixes, and I don't think any of the tracks on this album rise to that level. When electronic artists combine sounds from lots of places or invent new ones, cool things can happen. These remixes are just rejiggerings of an already extremely-tight album, though. It's nice for a change of pace, but none of the remixes actually achieve addition by subtraction.

I think this all went stupid when you referred to these remixes as "techno-heavy." Which is pretty much the opposite of what they are. Which is pretty much what the whole first half of the review you're bitching about spent its time explaining. Not to mention that the Pitchfork review of the original album, by the same person, is almost entirely about the fact that the album is dull and conventional but really "precisely-constructed," and how that's a good thing. The original got a higher rating.

Well, the actual text I wrote is "more techno-heavy" -- and while I'll admit it's not the best wording possible, it is still accurate. There are only so many synonyms for "electronic".

My point is that there isn't anything dull about the original tracks, unless you dislike the rock genre in general; and more particularly, that there isn't anything less dull about these remixes (aside from their novelty): they hew to normal remix tropes. Which are, if anything, considerably more dull than the admittedly well-worn guitar rock traditions that Silent Alarm embodies so well.

It's the implication that electronic music in general is somehow more sophisticated than rock and roll -- more "formally interesting" -- that got me riled up. The fact is that any idiot can fire up a copy of ACID (and many do). The electronic remix process makes it easy to break a holistic recording into its component parts. But that deconstruction is only interesting (in and of itself) if you're too dumb to appreciate the original work in its entirety.

oh, and Kriston: I believe Amon Tobin did the music to the last Splinter Cell game. So once we get that modchip set up, you'll be able to rock out while lurking in the shadows and strangling hapless guards. Something to look forward to.

I'm worried about your ears and your vocabulary! For one thing, "techno" is not a synonym for "electronic," no more so than "punk" is a synonym for "all guitar music ever." There's hardly anything on the remix album that constitutes "techno," and a surprisingly small amount of "electronic" of any form -- like I said, that seemed to be the whole point of the review.

And there IS something formally dull about the original tracks, which is perfectly fine -- as of that album, Bloc Party seemed interested in being a precise, whip-smart conventional rock band, not a "formally interesting one." That's a perfectly good goal, and one they succeeded at. One of the advantages of the remixes would seem to be that you can get more interesting spins on that. The remixes here don't "hew to normal remix tropes," and your sense that they do (or that there's something "techno" about them) mostly just suggests that you don't really know much about dance music or remixes or how they usually work. Most of these mixes just rearrange the parts to sound like a different kind of rock band, one that's a lot more free-thinking in its style than Bloc Party were to begin with. Free-thinking meaning not "dance music better than boring rock," but meaning variety, abstraction, and a willingness to break away from Bloc Party's complete inability to let two seconds go by without plugging in some fine-honed hook -- something that works very well for them on the original record, but is kind of nice to hear "them" loosen up from on these mixes.

Most of the rest of what you're saying was probably best left inside whichever ass it came out of back in 1975, but if you're really keen on calling up support for your fresh, innovative insight that "rock rules, disco sucks," you're welcome to it. It leaves you pretty much ruined for even pretending to talk about modern music, but whatever.

Ouch.

First, let me happily admit that I'm not familiar with the ridiculous constellation of subgenres within electronic music, and my language is no doubt imprecise.

But even if they don't sound like it to a fan of the genre, there are plenty of songs on this album with techno's fingerprints, stuck as they are in 4/4 with not much difference from the originals except having a bunch of instruments swapped for synths. The Banquet and Positive Tension remixes spring to mind, althought I suppose their bpm is too low to narrowly qualify. And most of these songs are perfectly conventional, layering rhythm then melody then vocals in a totally predictable way.

Most of these remixes don't change the basic rock structure of the songs in any significant manner, and those that do (e.g. Pioneers, She's Hearing Voices) seem pretty boring to me. I'll grant that they're abstract and different, though, and the fact that I didn't fall for them is a matter of taste.

I'm probably not the target audience for this. I like songs crammed with hooks and audio filigrees; I generally get sick of a sample by its third repetition in a track. And obviously I listen to a lot more rock music than electronic music. But I'm not incapable of enjoying or being impressed by the latter -- I certainly find Radiohead's IDM excursions to be pretty interesting, for example.

I've got nothing against these songs or anyone that likes them. I just fail to see what about them, besides novelty, could be considered to make them more interesting than the originals. It's mostly just processed or replaced instrumentation being run through a few patterns over a simplified rhythm section.

Using "Idioteque" as an I-like-electronic-music example is on par with saying "some of my best friends have seen black people on television."

Still, though, sorry to crash your blog, have a good day!

Fair enough. I don't like electronic music, then.

Black people are fine, though.