DFA1979 Wants To Dance With You

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 21, 2005 11:39PM

Remix albums are often a very bad idea riding the back of the easy cash-in cow. There have been exceptions, as with Massive Attack’s Mad Professor mauled No Protection or even The Space Monkeyz Vs. Gorrilaz collab Laika Come Home, but usually they just end up more like P-Diddly-doo’s We Invented the Remix. Recently Vice Records gave us a re-tooling of this year’s Bloc Party debut in remix form and that arguably could be filed under the aegis of the more successful remix discs.

Well, the folks over at Vice apparently thought that if they could transform one super hot Teen-Beat hipster fave into double the dollars with a remix disc, why not try for two. Death From Above 1979’s Romance Bloody Romance takes a handful of tunes from their own debut and feeds them through the dance-beat grinder in hopes of filling the dance floors of even the sweatiest, grimiest and most beer soaked of establishments.

The results are mixed. Anyone who saw the band at this year’s Intonation Fest can attest that the band’s tunes were ready-made to instigate a mad dance party just the way they are so for the most part the remixes consist of the basic tunes with little actual restructuring beyond the addition of some mainstream dance rhythms. What made the Bloc Party remaining so successful was the fact that artists actually tried to do something different with the songs. Sure we loved dancing in our bedroom to the Phones Disco Edit on that disc but we also dug the Mogwai and M83 soundscapes that rendered their source material unrecognizable but no less compelling.

So if DFA1979’s remix disc doesn’t succeed on snobby artistic merits, does it do the job of getting folks to shake their collective ass and don the boogie shoes? Well, the answer is, sometimes. The Alan Braxe and Fred Falke remix of “Black History Month” is pretty irresistible and “Blood On Our Hands (Justice Remix)” solidifies the house beat that you always knew danced under DFA1979’s jittery drums and slabs of guitar.

In the end the collection ends up not really being successful as a remix “album” so it’s probably not really a good entry point for the uninitiated, but if you’re already a fan then by all means give the disc a spin and dance, motherfucker, dance.