secondhand sounds: herbert remixes
peacefrog
Matthew Herbert releases yet another gem of an album, continuing his recent streak of top-quality material over the past few years. Secondhand Sounds, of course, isn't quite a new Herbert album, per se, so much as a compendium of some of his recent remix work, inclduing material for Louis Austen, Moloko, and Two Banks of Four. But for all practical purposes, it may as well be.
He's got all the staples of recent Herbert material on display here: the synthetic drum sounds fabricated from an elusively oblique collection of raw material, the jazzy riffs on house music, and the soulful vocals that give his material a certain 'poptastic' edge. And, fair enough, a number of the tracks on this 2CD gem of a double album are--literally--Herbert staples, reworkings of his own material as Doctor Rockit, Herbert and Wishmountain.
But--perhaps somewhat ironically--the best material on the album is his renditions of other artists' material. Disc One opens with a series of brilliant, delightful tracks by Nils Petter Molvaer, Mono, and Two Banks of Four. Herbert takes the source material and filters it through his Bodily Functions-styled aesthetic, giving birth to a a string of songs that continue to ascend higher and higher in their blissful glory.
Some of the tracks are relatively old, such as his remix of Moloko's "Sing it Back" (which was also featured on last year's Let's All Make Mistakes), but they're still wonderful assemblages of rhythm and melody. Let's hope some of his more recent remixes, for artists such as Bjork and Fridge, make an appearance on the (hoped for) sequel to Secondhand Sounds.
How's about Thirdhand Thrills?
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