Kings of Convenience ‘Versus’
March 25th, 2002 by freddie96
KINGS OF CONVENIENCE
Versus
(Source)
Norwegian songsters Kings of Convenience scored a surprise hit with their debut, ‘Quiet Is The New Loud’, a gentle, folky album largely without beats. If you found it fey and somewhat anemic (as I did), this album of remixes might just make you think again. Because it is, quite simply, very very good.
It opens with flavour-of-the-moment Royksopp’s reworking of ‘I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From’: a real gem. Four Tet then does the business with ‘The Weight Of My Words’, once again showing how much beauty can come from the meeting of acoustic and electronic. Riton turns ‘The Girl From Back Then’ into a kind of loose bossa nova (very winning), his Manchester soulmate Andy Votel reworks ‘Winning A Battle, Losing The War’ into something that doesn’t sound a million miles from Badly Drawn Boy (funnily enough), and David Whitaker provides a string arrangement of ‘Toxic Girl’ that sounds straight from the 60s.
And so on. There really isn’t any point in listing all the versions included here – not least because they are all worth hearing. So unlike the majority of remix albums, ‘Versus’ is one you can actually listen to all the way through without wincing. Nor will it bore you: it is a much more varied and inspiring listening experience than the original, proving that the remix, a rather tired genre these days, still has plenty of life in it when approached with originality and sensitivity. Definitely one of the most interesting leftfield albums I’ve heard all year. FB
