Taking a well-deserved victory lap after conquering both sides of the Atlantic with their second full-length album, Bear In Heaven lend out the keys to Daddy’s sports car for a follow-up of remixes, aptly titled, Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed. It’s always a leap of faith to hand over your creation to the care of other artists, but the impact of the original was sufficient to ensure that the Brooklyn-based synth trio had their pick of the litter. Among the selections include Swedish techno celeb The Field, Justin K. Broadrick of the dense and sometimes difficult shoe-core outfit Jesu, yet another Swedish act, Studio, along with a handful of some of the buzziest bands the States has to offer. Not bad company for a band whose interviews sometimes read like the internal monologue of a rock ‘n’ roll Harvey Pekar. As band member Adam Wills reports, "….there are a lot of panic attacks. We aren’t 21 – we have lives, wives, apartments to pay for…" Wills can rest easy on this one, as ten artists in ten tracks take Beast Rest Forth Mouth (QRO review) for a spin, and return it before midnight without a scratch.
Click here for photos of Bear In Heaven at 2010 Haldern Pop Festival in Rees-Haldern, Germany in the QRO Concert Photo Gallery
Click here for QRO’s review of Bear In Heaven at the Echo in Los Angeles, CA on July 27th, 2010
Home is where the heart is – sure enough, Bear In Heaven spotted some of the choicest tracks to their fellow Yanks. "Wholehearted Mess", "Lovesick Teenagers", and "Fake Out" went to Philadelphia’s Pink Skull, Brooklyn’s Twin Shadow and BRAHMS (QRO photos), respectively (Sweden’s Studio did manage to score the über-cool "You Do You", while The Field took "Ultimate Satisfaction"). The most memorable tracks, however, don’t always make for the most awe-inspiring remixes. If it’s not broke, why would you fix it? Twin Shadow mostly doesn’t, simply repeating the most enervating lyric in the song ("lovesick teenagers don’t ever die / They will live forever…") and minimally juicing out the structure with a few standard techno devices: the ‘fade’, the ‘build’, the ‘extended percussion’, etc. On the other hand, BRAHMS goes to town on "Fake Out", transforming the somewhat slow and sludgy original into an up-tempo dance number. One surprise of the album was the Deru remix of "Deafening Love" that managed to amp up the original, which was already oozing with ‘dark arts’ ambiance. Perry Farrell-style mantric crooning, chanting, and relentless march-step percussion over siren-song synths: it’s the Apocalypse, in musical form. Where do you go from there? Deru gets post-apocalyptic with drawn out chainsaw style effects and vocals that double, triple, quadruple the choral intensity of the original.
When you start with a good album, the urge to remix is most responsibly met with the question: why? But when you’ve got a great album, the response changes to: why not? There’s nothing that the remixers could have done with their assignments to discredit Beast Rest Forth Mouth. As it stands, the artists managed to soup up and extend the highest highs without becoming trite. A remix album will never be as good as the original, but when the quality is this good you take what you can get. With the staggered release dates (2009, U.S.A.; 2010, U.K.) the original is an album that could make ‘Best of’ lists two years running, tongue twister of an album title be damned. So why not throw a remix party?
MP3 Stream: "Fake Out (BRAHMS remix)"
