As I have stated many times before, I am a big fan of the remix. I’m old enough to remember when remixing tracks was just a marketing ploy by record labels to resell the same record to the same fanbase over and over again, but today they have gained a much nobler and more creative purpose.
For those brave enough to entrust their precious sonic children into the hands of others, knowing that the resulting new sound could take it anyway, the rewards far outweigh the risks. With the financial incentives now a thing of the past, it is all about creativity, continuing the story, and opening up alternative lives, and new identities for these songs.
Waves Crashing understands this, and so their recent album, In The Blur, is back with us, having not only been transformed, but transformed according to the imagination and skills of others.
Take “Divide,” which now opens this new presentation; in its original form, it ebbs and flows between massive shoegaze weight and dream-pop dexterity. Now, thanks to Echobox, its skittering percussion and more delicate sonics feel almost like Talk Talk’s early offerings, when pace was still as important as poise. They also cleverly strip “Marine Garden” back to its very alt-pop/post-punk essence without losing any of its original flavors, or adding an equal amount of new ones for each one lost.
In Summercharms’s hands, “Feel The Glow” remains a big song, but stripped of some of the abrasiveness, still shoe-gazey but perhaps heading towards more dream-pop cinematics rather than the dark anthemics of before.
And it is nice to see Lulu Lewis getting in on the act, and their rendering of “Circles” from perhaps the biggest song on the original album into a strange, strutting, dancefloor delicacy is exactly why people go down this route.
The big takeaway here is that two heads are better than one, that a band, no matter how creative and experimental, will tend to do things a certain way, that as far-flung as their collective imaginations might be, there is still a limit to how they think. The art is to get some other heads involved and give them carte blanche to take things apart and put them back together again. Do that, and the sky’s your limit. Do that, and you might end up with an album this forward-thinking and fantastic.
Bandcamp
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
