The third single off Thrills,Allien’s most recent full length is actually one of my least favoritetracks from a record that has taken some time to get used to. After Berlinette,the artist’s blissful attempt at incorporating glitch and pop elements into herunique blend of sleek post-electro and handmade futurist techno, Thrills seemed a rather straightforwardattempt at bringing her art back to the dancefloor: it's certainly addictive butfor many a sideways step. While Berlinette was subtly flavored withreferences to tired, classic trance, techno, and industrial tracks, Thrills seemed at first to lack thetransformative effect that such borrowings underwent on the previousrecord. Subsequent listens taught me toview the record as an experimentation session whose frequent over-stylizations becamethe frills of an attempt to meld the monolithic and minimal sounds of herinfluences with the Bpitch aesthetic embracing rough-edges, the supercool ofGerman techno, and a sense of scatterbrained, urban fusion.
Though it does have some nice processed vocalnoises, “Down” is just too much of the button-pushing, brow-beating minimalelectro for my taste. The vocal refrain,“Break Me Down,” is likewise not complex enough to carry any weight. Of the three remixes on this 12”, the first,from Dinky, a female Chilean DJ is the most successful, stretching the trackinto a nine-minute cool, pulsing atmospheric, politely avoiding the deadeningthree-note, time-keeping phrase of the original as much as possible, or insteadharmonizing it to make the effect less stunted. To the slowed beat, Dinky adds a muted plucked guitar or piano, giving“Down” a needed coastal air that all but completely obscures its original’smood. Italians Drama Society’s mix turns“Down” archetypal cold, chiming electro slow-burner, way too unchanging andpredictable to excite me, until, for about the last minute, when they chop inthe “ahh-ahh” vocal, louder and more stretchy than the original, sounding reallynice. French hip-hop producers FuckAloopbasically recreate the entire track, using mostly a slowed version of thestuttered industrial shuffle of the rhythm track as template, layed over withsome flashy, fried synth noodling and a re-created vocoder version of the vocalwhich, predictably, sounds annoying. Ifthey’d incorporated some faster breaks into the monotonous static rhythm, thistrack may have come out sounding alright, but the goofy synths do not jive wellwith anything, Ellen Allien or not. Honestly,I’m a bit surprised Ellen endorsed these last two mixes, after some good oneson her last two singles.
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