Tuesday, July 5, 2011
New Music Pylon covered by Deerhunter + remixed by New Yorker music scribe
Posted by Chad Radford @ChadRad on Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:21 PM
The A-side features Deerhunter’s cover of "Cool," which doesn’t vary too much from Pylon’s original 1979 single, albeit sped up on a microscopic level. Bradford Cox does his best Vanessa Briscoe Hay impersonation, summoning an intense falsetto, the likes of which he hasn’t really flaunted since the Fluorescent Grey EP in ’07. As covers go, it definitely demonstrates a reverence for the original, but obviously superior version.
For the B-side, the New Yorker's music critic and Ui co-founder Sasha Frere-Jones, operating as Calvinist, remixed Pylon’s song “Yo-Yo,” with an added vocal track from Sleigh Bells' siren Alexis Krauss. The remix strips away many of the song’s more traditional rock/pop song sensibilities to build around Krauss’ seductive voice with bleak electronics and subtle hooks. Here “Yo Yo” is driven by synthetic, proto-industrial textures, and although it's a dark musing on psychosexual obsession, torment and the games that people play, there’s an emotional extravagance pushing the song along with masochistic delight. Tension comes together within a darker cannon of beats, textures and atmosphere than the original, yet it remains very humanizing, and it totally steals the show.
“I think of this as a wonderful opportunity for an extension of the life of Pylon that was not expected, and so I greet it with great pleasure,” says former Pylon bass player Michael Lachowsky. “It suggests that there may be more ways in which Pylon can continue to be actively engaged in the administration of our legacy, but without the ability to create new work and play new shows, it's hard to know what form any future efforts would take beyond this awesome single.”
The fact that the 7-inch contains one remix and one cover — the “Unsaved Mix” (included below) is an online bonus — from a broad range of artists, saves it from falling into the category of just another remix record, giving each song a renewed burst of energy, and making for an interesting bookend to Pylon’s catalogue.
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