Pitchfork

There are a lot of things I could've imagined Australian song-grafters The Avalanches doing with a remix of Belle & Sebastian's "I'm a Cuckoo", the song being already three-quarters a mash-up with its copyright-taunting resemblance to "The Boys are Back in Town". None of these predicted outcomes, however, involved the DJ sextet morphing the Scottish band's coy Thin Lizzy karaoke into a Graceland tribute with instrumentation straight out of a David Byrne wet dream. Here, The Avalanches couple Stuart Murdoch's original vocal part (the only element of the original song that remains) with their beloved flutes and accordions, pile on busy hand-drum percussion, and prod a Sudanese kid's choir into chanting around the circumference.

The surprising juxtaposition is goofily jarring at first, but with its poor fit, soon wears down to novelty-- after all, Murdoch's lyrical culture grab is aimed at Japan, not Africa. For a band coming off an album that proved they sound their best when their soft-pop leanings are amplified (np: "Dear Catastrophe Waitress") rather than dampened in favor of genre colonization (np: "If She Wants Me"), the remix is a botched experiment, coming off like a British Sesame Street foreign locale segment.