Au Revoir Simone – Night Light (The Remixes)

Au Revoir Simone - Night Light (The Remixes)

So. What is Night Light (The Remixes) then? A ‘tween albums filler? A long-held desire realised? Or a bit of a lame attempt and for Au Revoir Simone completists only?

Things certainly start well as Neon Indian takes on ‘Another Likely Story’ and the beats start out with a touch of menace, rather like a John Carpenter soundtrack. The song goes wrong though when the vocals arrive on the scene. They’ve been stripped of whatever effects were in use on the original version and this only serves to heighten the impression that the music is actually at a different pace and the whole song begins to jar. The melancholy of the original has also been lost and it could even be said that this is less danceable too.

As the running order mirrors that of Still Night, Still Light ‘Shadows’ is track two. Jens Lekman manages to screw this up into some pseudo-Parisian doo-wop abomination and yet again you long to scurry back to the safety of the original. ‘All Or Nothing’ gets the Nouvelle Vague (via The Thrills) treatment from Jensen Sportag but still ends up all the blander for it. ‘The Last One’ fares pretty well for the most part in its reworked dub form, courtesy of Mack Winston, so at this point you feel quite happy to see things through to the end.

Electro enters the fray on the Montag remix of ‘Trace A Line’, which is suitably glacial in all the right places and would like as not fit comfotably into a club set, atleast up till about the final minute. ‘Take Me As I Am’ has a minimal, glitchy reworking from Max Cooper but at nearly treble the length of the original it takes so bloody long to get going you’ll have nodded off while the insect noises that make up the first couple of minutes are still crackling and rustling from the speakers. The longest reversioning here though comes in the shape of the eight minute ‘Organised Scenery’ as manipulated by Bass Clef. Eight minutes of nothing special.

As with other similar such remix projects at least one track gets the beats treatment twice herein and so the album closes with another version of ‘Another Likely Story’, this time from Aeroplane. Think pre-programmed Casio and some pretty sweet bass of the (almost) Peter Hook school and you’ll get the idea. Definitely a case of saving the best for last but not reason enough alone to shell out the cash as even completists will get bored.

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