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Heads We Dance: Favourite Remix #4

Pop stars should seem like they’ve been beamed in from another planet.

Posted 14th September 2009, 2:09pm in Features, by Heads We Dance
Heads We Dance Fever Ray - ‘Seven’ (Crookers & CSS Remixes)

I’ve always thought that pop stars should seem like they’ve been beamed in from another planet. From Bowie to Lady Gaga, great pop music should be dramatic, ridiculous and challenging as well as entertaining. Fever Ray, the latest project from Karen Dreijer of The Knife, is an excellent case in point. If you’ve heard the eponymous debut album, seen the skeleton-face make-up press shots or watched any of the videos, notably ‘When I Grow Up’, you’ll know that Fever Ray teeters along a fine line between compellingly dark pop music and overblown pretension. Luckily, Dreijer and producer Christoffer Berg have managed to pull it off by crafting one of the best electronic records of the year.

There have been several remixes of the current Fever Ray single ‘Seven’ but the Crookers and CSS remixes are the pick of the bunch; they are also completely different, demonstrating that the best remixes are far more than knuckleheaded kick drums, octaving basslines and disco hihats!

Crookers deliver a characteristically hard electro reworking of the original. The vocal is chopped, stretched and pasted on top of retro ringtones and a synth line which is half Vangelis and half US Civil War bugle; the only identifiable remnant of the original is the repeated line “if we have time”. By contrast, the CSS remix is more faithful to the original but swaps Dreijer’s ambient backing vocals and Berg’s staccato rhythms for a dark 80s funfair synth, Stuart Price bassline and skittery 808s.

Both remixes are fantastic but if forced to choose I’d go for Crookers. Go here to listen to the single version of ‘Seven’ along with the remixes (the Martyn remix is pretty cool too) to see whether you agree! The video for ‘Seven’ is also worth a watch:

Seven from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

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