Pitchfork

Even though LCD Soundsystem's killer second album, Sound of Silver, isn't released until next Tuesday, a scrappy team of mash-up wizards, remix artists, and producers have already reworked the album in its entirety, via website lcdremixed.com. The entire collection, titled Sounds Like Silver, is free for download and features contributions mostly from under-the-radar ACID pros, including ATOM, Team9, McSleazy, and most notably, the vastly under-repped Go Home Productions.

For those who didn't closely follow the original bastard-pop/mashup boom of 2001-03, Go Home Productions' Mark Vidler was among the genre's earliest innovators: While others were simply throwing any combination of songs at the wall to see what stuck-- to varying degrees of success-- GHP was leagues ahead, incorporating elements of multiple tracks at a time to retool and re-envision their entire foundation.

Go Home Productions certainly produced no shortage of the kind of party anthems, but a number of his tracks also showed what was possible when reimagining songs from a more pensive perspective. Though the titles were no less absurd than those of Freelance Hellraiser, Richard X, or Dsico, some of his most effective tracks recontextualized the emotional core of his source material altogether.

On paper, it seems crazy to suggest that a song called "Oasis Are Gaye" (MP3) could turn Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" from a late-night soul jam into a genuinely bleak acoustic heartbreaker, by simply pairing it with the guitar strums of Oasis' "Wonderwall". But situating Marvin's lusty purrs against a more plaintive and intimate chord progression gave it a desolate urgency-- that what Marvin sought was respite from a cruel world in the arms of his girl rather than just another Friday night booty call.

Better still was "Sly Beyonce Walks Like a Nerd" (MP3), one of the first four-way mashups: Against the vintage-sounding R&B backdrop of NERD's "Run to the Sun", "Crazy in Love", "Walk Like an Egyptian", and Sly and the Family Stone's "Family Affair" traded verses in a nostalgic, dream-like rollerskate jam. (The song also scored one of Pitchfork's first-ever five-star track reviews.)

So nearly half a decade later, it makes sense that GHP's remix of LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver track "Us vs Them", while not a mashup, is unsurprisingly the Sounds Like Silver compilation's best remix by a mile-- and also the only one that arguably improves on the original.

Dropping in a massively heavy beat, accented by a tangle of polyrhythmic percussion, a bounding bassline, and enough breakdowns and comeups for a track four times its length, it is-- of the 30+ we've already heard-- the single most effective of any LCD Soundsystem remix to be released in anticipation of Sound of Silver. If the DFA knows what's up (we suspect they do), this one should be commissioned as an official B-side in the very near future.

MP3: > LCD Soundsystem: "Us vs Them (Go Home Productions Remix)"
[from Sounds Like Silver; free remix compilation from lcdremixed.com]