‘Obtuse’ would be a reasonable choice of adjective to describe The Twilight Sad. You could never accuse them of playing it safe or of pandering to the fans (or anyone else for that matter). Whatever they do, they do it on their own terms. So while they’re not an obvious band for remix treatment (why mess with perfection?), they’ve chosen now to have tracks from their last album remixed by an array of artists – from, as the press release points out, ‘established acts such as Liars, Tom Furse from The Horrors and Com Truise, as well as up and coming a rtists such as Warsnare and Ambassadeurs – not because it’s hip to do so, but seemingly just because they felt like it.
Rather than remixing ‘No One Can Ever Know’ in its entirety, ‘No One Can Ever Know – The Remixes’ features three versions of ‘Sick’ – two being different Brokenchord mixes, plus two versions apiece of ‘Nil’, ‘Alphabet’ and ‘Not Sleeping’.
The glitchy, fucked-up mix of ‘Sick’ that kicks things off – or perhaps more accurately lurches into motion at the start of the album – isn’t exactly representative of The Twilight Sad. In fact, it’s not representative of anything much other than just how radically a remix can alter a song: in this instance, it’s completely unrecognisable.
The Com Truise remix of the same song that follows is also a long way removed from the sparse, glacial original, featuring as it does a thumping stop-start beat that really dominates, with some Depeche Mode electronica and some weird jazzy stuff here and there, but James Graham’s vocals are preserved.
The first remix of ‘Nil’, courtesy of Liars, focuses on the looping, bubbling synth that enters the original around halfway through. The brooding piano is in the mix which serves to retain some of the atmosphere. The vocals – heavily treated with backwards delay – sound like ‘Pornography’ era Cure and the selection largely centres around the chilling hook ‘I will write your requiem the day you’re dead’. The Breton remix of the track is quite different, and despite its throbbing bass and echo-heavy take on the vocal snippets, somehow comes across as being rather more upbeat, both in tempo and mood. It’s ok, but lacks the building tension that makes the original what it is.
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Tom Furze takes ‘Not Sleeping’ on a completely different and unexpected trajectory of instrumental semi-ambience, and the instrumental take on ‘Alphabet’ by Glasgow’s Optimo club night duo JD Twitch and JG Wilkes pulls a full-ranging dancefloor-friendly bass throb off the deck without doing too much damage to the original song. Ambassadeaurs increase the tempo of the original on their version, and despite the vocals being preserved, the synth-stabs and Akai snares fail to produce a great deal of atmosphere.
The result, then, is something of a mixed bag, which is par for the course when it comes to remixes. It’s certainly not a worthy introduction to the band, but it does show how they never stay in the same place and are constantly pushing to evolve. And that can only be a good thing.
The Twilight Sad Online
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