Seattle-based indie rock quartet Minus The Bear have already attracted high-profile friends in the form of Battles and Blood Brothers, and this latest release on Seattle label Suicide Squeeze acts as a remix companion record to their preceding 2005 album Menos El Osos. In this case, the band have called upon an impressive roster of both their mates and similarly likeminded thinkers that takes in the likes of Battles’ Tyondai Braxton, Anticon’s Alias and Andrew “Fog’ Broder to tackle a track-by-track reworking of that aforementioned album, with consistently interesting results. Particularly apparent from the outset is the sheer diversity of different flavours the broad range of remixers lend to Minus The Bear’ fairly “straight down the line’ earnest US indie rock approach.
P.O.S. opens proceedings with a reworking of Drilling that plays with rapid cut and paste quiet / loud drum dynamics in a manner that calls to mind Four Tet’s more percussively furious outings, the original chorus-verse structure shining through all the complex editing. By contrast, Fog opts for a doomy downbeat trajectory on his remix of Memphis & 53rd that fuses jagged swathes of goth-infused guitar fuzz with narcoticised-sounding beats while delayed-out fragments of David Knudson’s original vocals flit through, before Tyondai Braxton’ synth-heavy reworking of Fulfill The Dream ushers in a fluid, jazz-syncopated vibe that’s pure electro-tropicalia. Elsewhere, Dalek’s Oktopus gives The Dame Needed Me a synth-heavy, ironclad hiphop overhaul that pits shuffling drums against swirling clouds of guitar feedback and Knudson’ dub-disembodied sounding vocals, before Jason Clark of Pretty Girls Make Graves rewires El Torrente into sinister downbeat electronics in a similar vein to Amon Tobin, with digitally contorted timestretch effects snarling beneath sparse industrial rhythms and snatches of tinkling piano.
All in all, Interpretaciones Del Osos represents a consistently strong remix collection that manages to take Minus The Bear’ original source material to considerably different places, in fact, apart from Alias’ curiously pedestrian contribution, which comes across as the sort of thing RJD2 might try if he were aiming for MTV “moderate rock’ crossover, you’d be hard pressed to recognise the originals at all. File this alongside Bloc Party’s recent remix collection as a worthwhile exercise in indie-rock reshaping that manages to throw up some intriguing new angles.
Chris Downton
