Bloc Party – Intimacy Remixed

Bloc Party's frustratingly ill-realised third album Intimacy needed an overhaul, but Intimacy Remixed is not the overhaul it needed. If the original album was the band leaving their rock origins largely behind in a dramatic but alienating shift towards electronica, then Remixed represents the band surrending the entire Intimacy project to a group of electronica remixers to do with it what they wished. It isn't the first time, of course - Bloc Party did the same thing with their spiky rock debut, but far more so than Silent Alarm Remixed, this is a key chapter in Bloc Party's transformation not only as a band but also as an ethic and a concept.The remixers are a varied bunch, from Armand van Helden to Mogwai, joined also by Banjo or Freakout, Bloc Party pal and producer Paul Epworth (AKA Phones) and various others. You wouldn't be able to tell which track was remixed by whom without it saying in the track titles, so homogenous a mess is Intimacy Remixed. It seems that the first task approached by each remixer, though, was to swiftly excise almost all the Bloc Party in the tracks, and then to mostly fill those gaping vacuums with groaning, bassy synths and endless looping beats, with scarcely any regard to what the songs originally sounded like in terms of tempo, mood, or meaning. Vocals have been largely expunged, the remainder being mercilessly slashed to ribbons and looped so that Kele Okereke's words are devoid of all context and emotion. The songs have been extended in most cases, stringing them out into soulless, synthetic "bangers" that will prove passable for clubs and almost unlistenable in any other context. Think less "remix", more "cannibalism".No Age's treatment of 'Better Than Heaven' turns it into an absolute mess, but perhaps the most strikingly dreadful butchering here is van Helden's efforts on 'Signs', which was originally a sparkling album highlight and is now an abomination, divorced from everything that made the original track good and - stunningly - basing the shredded vocals around one of the most spectacular of the album's several lyrical clangers.Most bands would be horrified if they heard their music treated like this, and for this to be put out as a commercial release with the band's name on it is just baffling. Knowing that this wouldn't even exist without Okereke and co's backing, its release not only confirms that Bloc Party have made a major change of genre, but also indicates they seem to have lost any sense of integrity and logic. A parade of both Bloc Party's and electronic music's worst and most cynical excesses, Intimacy Remixed is musical car crash too horrific to be worthy of even the briefest bit of rubbernecking. 16%Bloc Party on MySpace