Peter Chambers: Something must have happened to Matthew Dear’s head a year or two back, or the Audion part of it at least. Where his earlier work under the alias presented a swirling maelstrom of jacking techno that sounded exactly like the album covers’ seasick art suggested, the new “Mouth to Mouth” style tracks are like a wave that never breaks, pitching you further and higher as the “ray gun” noises hit you harder and rougher each time, only to pull back on the brink of each successive “impact”. It’s a fresh approach that’s bound to inspire imitators, but for the moment, Audion seems to have become a genre unto himself, and it’s a state of play that Dear appears to be really enjoying on this record. It’s not quite the smasher that “Mouth to Mouth” proved it to be, but nonetheless, this is one big rollercoasting mo-fo of a track, with a slowly ascending/descending flanged scale that has absolutely nothing to do with the Hot Chip original, but is bound to drive the floor hog wild—and isn’t that the point? As a “remix” it’s a non-event—the vocal is the only snippet to be retained from the band’s version—but as yet another example of Dear’s new accuracy with his ray-spitting bop gun, it’s a bulls-eye.

Mallory O’Donnell: Perhaps I’m too in thrall to the original, but the buzz that this remix is getting in circles bloggy quite baffles me. In terms of creative restructuring and incorporation of select elements from the original, it’s technically excellent—Matthew Dear completely reconfigures the song into a neo-tech shuffle with lots of blurting bottom end, crackling hiss and dry percussion. The vocals are a wispy spectre haunting the track at various points throughout, and the cavernous sustained note that drops several times is suggestive of a higher plateau. The only problem is we never get there—it comes in first at the four minute mark, then more often, but it only marks a dip in the energy level when it acts as nothing more than a precursor to slightly more excitable bloopery and drum paddling. I thought the point of architecture was to build something useful and beautiful.

EMI UK / 12EMDJ 715
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