Junior Boys
Dead Horse EP (Domino)
By Kelly Shindler
Published: May 11th, 2007 | 4:17pm
After finding their extraordinary So This Is Goodbye splashed across the hottest top-ten lists of 2006, Junior Boys, the soft-spoken Canadian duo with the funny name, are back with the proverbial remix record. At least the Dead Horse EP, a 40-minute behemoth featuring the likes of one band you surely know and four producers you probably don’t, can tide us over until the next long-player drops.
Hot Chip, the people’s favorite, kicks off with a delightfully buzzy reworking of dance floor grinder “In the Morning.” The other heavyweight, Detroit techno guru Carl Craig, takes on “Like a Child,” but his minor drones are a major misstep from the hushed, synth-stroked luminosity of the original. Kode9, who runs London’s Hyperdub label, plunges “Double Shadow” into a dub hole so trippy and deep that the track is utterly unrecognizable. Things look up with Marsen Jules’s ambient stab at “FM,” which he translates into a shimmer of echoes, snipped around only two hooks. It’s upbeat and pregnant with hope, an apropos ending to the album. But the real gem here is Tensnake, whose clubby rendition, also of “FM,” swells into a throbbing Italo disco—laced fury that makes you forget, at least momentarily, that the original was practically a ballad.
Though these collective tracks fall short of some of the Boys’ other remixed finery (courtesy of Fennesz, Manitoba, and Morgan Geist, among others), Dead Horse still proves that their music is a goldmine worth exploring, whether the first time around or the three thousandth. As the title suggests, this is one band you can listen to ad nauseum and keep hitting repeat. They’re that good.
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