This is really a companion piece to Patrick Kelleher’s rather brilliant debut album You Look Cold, and it’s almost not fair to judge it as a stand-alone piece of work. Here, the cream of Ireland’s left-field musical talent tinker around the edges of Kelleher’s self-produced oeuvre (luminaries like Katie Kim, Hunter-Gatherer, Jape, David Kitt, Thread Pulls are all present and accounted for) and when they finish doing what they do, what we’re left with is an album of fuzzy, lo-fi electronica with a certain ramshackle appeal, but which doesn’t really have the originality and charm of the original.
What made You Look Cold work was some intimate songwriting and singing, coupled with the sense that, production wise, it was the equivalent of someone jerry-rigging a working automobile from the contents of a road-side dump. In general the remixers try to soup up Kelleher’s jalopy by adding go-faster stripes and fins (at worst, reverberating electronic clichés), and many remove the songy-ness altogether... which seems to miss the point. On the plus side, the playful ‘A Boy Named Suzie Q’ (as remixed by The Booklovers) isn’t on the original record, Jape turns the pastoral acoustic track ‘Wonder’ into a stripped-down hymn from the church of techno, Hulk adds askance harmonic overtones to ‘I Am Eustice’ and Thread Pulls’ version of ‘Finds You’ has great fun trying to resolve wilfully unquantised and ramshackle drums with the more controlled source material.
At the end of the day, however, that source material is just better. And while it’s interesting to flip over and back from the original to the remixes, you quickly find yourself listening to just the original.