I Trust Their Friends
Stars, the electro-pop quintet recently had their third LP completely remixed, sending P. Bradley Robb into a fit of worry. He doesn’t dance, he hates remixes, and he loves Stars. Is there anyway that this album could turn out half as good as the source material?
P. Bradley Robb
On a Monday night in June I was asked to dance. My response was both sarcastic and true, “I’m white. You knew I was white when you got into this relationship. I’ve always been white, and you can’t expect me to stop being white now.” Like the majority of straight, white males, the dance floor is a social death sentence. For me, music isn’t about dancing, it’s about emotion, about lyrics that border on poetry and music that acts as a metaphor. The relationship I’ve had with my album collection has outlasted every relationship I’ve ever had that wasn’t bound by blood. My music has traveled with me. The hundreds of jewel cases that line my shelves each bear their own scars, testaments to my travels, to my personal pains, to my own history that has yet to be spilled out in print. And in those cases, on those compact discs, there lies the greater truth, the words too big to be expressed by themselves. No, music isn’t for dancing. Music can be used to celebrate and to mourn, to enhance and amplify, or to numb and deny. Music can say that she’s here now, and it can lie and say she’ll be back. And music can certainly be made to move, can grab you by the insides and rip out your inner most thoughts through your ears. But, dancing? Not these feet. Not my music.
And the remix? The remix all too often to ruins a perfectly good pop song by upping the bass and replacing actual instrumentation with tricks ripped from a Pro Tools equipped Power Mac. This is why I have a long history of disliking dance mixes. All too often a remix dumbs down a song, stripping away the layers, the intricacy, the place where the truth lies – in the details. The remix takes a song that I can listen to, can carry with me, can build a relationship around, and translates it into a foreign language.
About a year ago I formed a relationship (completely unbeknownst to them) with a Montreal quintet called Stars. I came to Stars after following the indie adage of “Love a band, love their label.” My gateway band was the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene and the label was Arts and Crafts. BSS hit me on so many levels that I was willing to take chances on Stars. Yes, Stars tended to be a bit more electronic than I typically care for, but BSS’s early works tend to be heavier on instrumentation that I would normally have liked, and my relationship with them (also unbeknownst) was as rich and deep as any could hope for. It might have taken the first fifteen minutes of Stars first LP (for I started at the beginning) Nightsongs for me to fall in love, but fall I did. Stars’ personal blend of electro-pop included lyrics that were, more often than not, clever to the points of instant endearment. Nightsongs’ stripped down ‘Tonight’ showed that the electronic band was more than capable of real, raw, and broken emotion tapped through the most delicate of metaphors. And the vocal pairings of Toquil Campbell and Amy Millan is a love affair in sound. Eloquent. Delicate. Raw. I chewed through Heart. And I made a nest inside of the third LP, Set Yourself on Fire.
By the time I was fully versed in the Stars universe, by the time I’d all but memorized every one of their songs, I received news that caught me off guard. Stars was remixing their entire third LP. Beyond that, they weren’t even doing it themselves. On one hand, I could always use more Stars, but on the other, the very word remix took a bit of my breath. I feared the worst, an album I had personally invested myself in, had managed to match memories to songs, had managed to craft new ones to, was at risk of having its immortal soul destroyed. How on earth could ‘One More Night’ survive the remix? And ‘Reunion’? Would that be lost in the shuffle of trying to get the indie kids to dance again? Could the work of Stars survive degrading into the science fiction realm?
I honestly didn’t have a great deal of hope until I heard a cut from the album. My first new experience with remixed Stars was ‘Reunion’ as envisioned by Jason Collett. And hearing the track was like falling in love again. Collet’s remix takes the original track, with its rather solid bass-line, jaunting guitars, and descriptions of drug-induced, suburban teenage life, and steps up the classic rock feel, and he steps it up significantly. With the first listen I suddenly knew that my band, Stars, had put themselves in good hands. They were calling the album Do You Trust Your Friends?, and I have to say that from that first cut, I certainly did.
The concept is rather novel, a band takes perhaps their best known album and lets a dozen or so other artists in isolation remix a single track. The results are then banded together, placed in the order of the original album, and released. Stars could have perhaps kept the end results to themselves, enjoying how others interpreted their art, but that would have raged against what the liner notes say this album is intended as, a statement of trust. “We’re hoping that you open this record, give it a listen and thing that it might be time to let your buddy repaint your bedroom, or edit your novel, or tell you honestly what annoys them most about you.” The album is the next advance in the collaborative, collective sense of music that certain members of the independent arts community have embraced of late. The album is a slap in the face to the major labels, to the concept of intellectual property rights, of coveting our own artistic creations.
And it’s really fucking good. Yes, there is a certain disjointed feel, with each track not quite fitting with the ones that follow. But this is because each remixing friend is so different, that even when working with paints from the original source, the ending portrait was essentially a self-portrait of the remixer. And with a cast of remixers ranging from Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) to Andrew Whiteman (Apostle of Hustle) to the Stills and Matthew Adam Hart (The Russian Futurists) the talent sampled for this album is a veritable who’s who of the indie arts, at least the Canadian aspect, not to mention a great means of introduction.
I must set aside my music snob ego for a second and say that I’d never heard of half the remixers prior to picking up Do You Trust Your Friends?, but after placing the album into my stereo I listened for a full four times before even picking up my phone. The album worked deeper into me than even the source material had, providing new sets of insight, allowing for new memories. I stopped carrying my MP3 player in my car, choosing instead to lug the album around. Visitors to my apartment were subjected to comparison listens in which tracks from both source and remix were played back to back. I began to lecture. I quickly forgot my initial fears. Fears assuaged and almost forgotten, I set out to make friends with the remixers, at least the ones I wasn’t already friends with.
It felt good, to take a chance and come out with something you can classify as a win. For Stars, I think they did. Do You Trust Your Friends? is varied enough to hold something for everyone. And beyond that, it shows that remix needn’t be a profane word. These aren’t songs to dance to, they’re songs that took the truth of one band and supplied the truth of another artist. Each song inherently becomes a duet, a communion, and in doing so, comes to represent what music is about: art. Art needs people to survive, and that’s something I think is far too often forgotten in the modern music industry.
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Succinct in thought; not in written expression = “right on”! Thanks for your review.
J.B.
[...] Da sie mit dem monumentalen, “Set Yourself on Fire” nicht nur großen Erfolg, sondern einen “career defining moment” erlebten (gerade eben erschien unter dem Titel “Do You Trust Your Friends?” sogar eine Remix-Version, in denen andere kanadische Künstler die Songs des Albums neu interpretierten), sind natürlich die Rezeptionsbedingungen für ihr neuestes Album ganz andere als 2001. Wiesengrund hat Recht: hier kann man tatsächlich davon sprechen, dass die kanadische Invasion vorbei ist. Der Sound hat sich durchgesetzt, ist zum Allgemeinen geworden. Nicht nur im unmittelbaren Umfeld von Bands wie den Stars (aber dies gilt auch für die gestern besprochene Leslie Feist) gibt es zahllose Epigonen, für die diese musikalische Sprache zur Normalität geworden ist und die gar nicht mehr bewusst erkennen können, an wem sie sich da bei jedem zweiten Akkordwechsel orientieren oder vergreifen. Aber die Stars gehen mit dieser Problematik mit beinahe schlafwandlerischer Sicherheit um (gehen sogar einige Risiken ein), was aber nicht allzu sehr überrascht, wenn man sich den Text ihres 2001er Songs “Write What You Know” näher betrachtet, der sich über die Rezepthaftigkeit der kulturellen Produktion mokiert: “Write what you know / Keep that story funny / Have a happy ending / Make the female sexy … This ending is so sexy”. [...]