
Versus
a review by Chris Rose ofrelease format Versus by Kings of Convenience (CD Album)
text
Apparently wooed into this remix venture by the electronic community itself (in so far as an 'electronic community' exists), Norway's finest 'new acoustic troubadors' (yawn) take on some fearless remixers and find a surprising affinity between fey whimsy and clicks'n'cuts.
Norwegian neighbours Royskopp, for example, take the lovely picked acoustic guitar from 'I Don't Know What I Can Save You From' and add some gentle beats and dappled squelches to create a cross between Balearic-lite and the theme from a seventies' TV show. Pleasant, but little more.
More interesting is the apparently burgeoning Manchester-Bergen axis (possibly caused by the brutal levels of rainfall in each city). Grand Central's Riton turns 'The Girl From Back Then' into a delicious little samba jazz piece, with a fuzzily-plucked double bass and gorgeous muted trumpet bringing to mind the early '80s whitey jazz of Weekend. Andy Votel takes 'Winning a Battle, Losing the War' for a little walk around his own lo-fi folk territory and Alfie lend some muscle to their re-made 'Failure', giving it some clanking drums, groaning guitar and re-singing it with Manc accents. All much more satisfying.
Also doing the 'making it sound like our own track' trick are Ladytron, who turn 'Little Kids' into a piece of 80's electropop (to which Erlend Oye's flattened voice sounds fantastically well-suited, actually) and Four Tet. The ridiculously talented Kieran Hebden takes on 'The Weight of My Words': background children's voices lead in to some phased guitar and a melody line that could knock you out at fifty paces. Combined with other Four Tet trademarks such as light, shuffling drums, muted strings and burbling guitar or mandolin details, this stunning piece of music is worth the price of the LP on its own.
The high points of this record make you find yourself wishing that these ideal collaborations were actually a real, organic group, seamlessly mixing the electronic and the acoustic, the hard and the soft, the new and the old, the quiet and the loud. Still, a judicious use of the skip button or programming facility on your CD player and you've already got it here. Added to that, apparently fired by the success of some of these mixes and the Kings' popularity on the dance scene, Erlend Oye is working on an 'extremely electronic' solo project.
So maybe electronic will be the new acoustic. Or should that be the other way round?
Posted by Chris Rose at 15:38, 11 Jan 2002