Pitchfork

The Honeydrips' "Fall From a Height" is an unrequited electro-pop love song cloaked in existential dread it knows full well is hilarious. But that doesn't make the dread any less real. Gothenburg, Sweden's Mikael Carlsson, the man behind the Honeydrips, lets a distorted bass guitar drone behind sparkling electronics reminiscent even in the original of Kompakt's euphoric Swedish neo-trance dude the Field, while great quotes from Annie Hall and Rebel Without a Cause get juxtaposed overhead. "I always thought I could fall from a height and land on my face/ Now I'm considering throwing in the towel," Carlsson sings on the track, from 2007 album Here Comes the Future, out via the Tough Alliance's Sincerely Yours imprint.

On this B-side from the Honeydrips' "I Wouldn't Know What to Do" single, the Field's Axel Willner gives the tempo a slight bump and adds his distinctive, finely-sliced repetitions to make "Fall From a Height" sound like something that could have belonged on this year's Best New Music'd From Here We Go Sublime. Willner sheds all but perhaps just the percussive traces of the film samples, and scraps Carlsson's mournful voice altogether. The results convey the weightless drift described by a young Woody Allen character in the original song. "The universe is everything, and if it's expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything," says the boy playing Allen's childhood self.

His mom's famous reply: "What is that your business?!"

[from the "I Wouldn't Know What to Do" single; original track from Here Comes the Future; both out now on Sincerely Yours]