| · All this from two samples.
Having been told that The Summerlad Gives to You the Golden Hammers Project is a remix album, I am faced with a conundrum. The basis of the remixes – The Summerlad’s "Golden Hammers," a song to be included on the band’s forthcoming full-length follow-up to 2001’s Distance Will Be Swept Up – is the final track on the record, coming after all the remixes. How do I review this album?
I see two solutions: 1. I break reviewer protocol and listen to the last track first. I won’t get the full "flow" of the album, but I should understand where the four remixers – Scott Burman, Echolalia, Brent Watson and Montreal’s Jace Lasek – are coming from. 2. I listen to the album as a unified whole. Flow? Check. Understanding? Negatory.
In the face of uncertainty, one should always make a compromise. I listen to the first 30 seconds of "Golden Hammers," then go back to the beginning of the album. I have an idea of the flavour now – the root note of the melody, gently picked electric guitar, a line or two of vocals. I’ve shaken the Christmas present.
Jace Lasek elects to start the album off with just that root note (it’s a B, in case you were wondering) – a drone which fluctuates slightly, augmented at one point by a short burst of static. On the second track, he mixes in some of the guitar I heard earlier, some drums, an intriguing lyrical snippet. These tracks seem almost to be bookends to what I heard of the song – one an intro, one an extended outro jam. His third track – the second-last on the album – will complete the picture with a near-approximation of the original.
As Brent Watson drowns the B-chord drone in a sea of tinny keyboards, I am reminded of the episode of Friends in which Ross rediscovers his musical ambitions. Then Watson moves from sitcoms to a soundtrack for a black-and-white experimental short film. Another lyrical snatch is tossed into an atmospheric wilderness. Scott Burman (a.k.a. Wolves and Children) follows the same model on his single contribution. I search for a through-line.
Echolalia (a.k.a. John Ressler) resurrects the B-chord in the "Born Head Mix," throwing it into a sea of swirling electronics reminiscent of a Galaxy-class starship’s engine room. The warp-core ambience takes over on the 16-minute "Trembling Brings You Closer To The Truth Mix," where the note resurfaces occasionally like a bubble in a plasma coil.
And the original? It’s subtly hooky, driving yet cosmic, with former Primrod P7’s inscrutable vocals woven through the mix. When is that full-length coming out?
Don’t think of The Golden Hammers Project as a "remix" album. It’s much closer to the classical notion of a theme and variations, where a simple premise – here, one guitar line and one vocal sample – is convoluted almost unrecognizably, yet remains hauntingly familiar.
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