Mallory O’Donnell: “Boy from School” walks Hot Chip’s typical tightrope: eminently danceable, with a rather eyebrow-raising detour thrown in halfway that sort of ruins the blissful singularity of it all. This, my friends, is why God invented the remix. Up first is Steve Barnes’ “Cosmic Sandwich Remix” (I can’t think of it without laughing,) a deep-house rework that sucks most of the soul out of the original vocal. Things get a bit more interesting around the four-minute mark, but it’s too late for most of us to bliss out by now. Thankfully, Erol Alkan is as reliable as ever, injecting extra handclaps and retaining the moments of beauty in the original, while still keeping your sweatshirt sleeves rolled up and your ass swaying.

Nick Sylvester: No knock, “Boy from School” sounds more mash-up than song. Vocal and musical energy levels couldn’t differ more, as Alexis Taylor’s breathy carole breezes over a beat four times faster, clickier, more bubbly, double handclap turnarounds, and all. It’s the band’s trick throughout The Warning, which is one reason the LP strikes me so samey. That said, “Boy” is aces, maybe even better than its louder cousin “Over and Over.” I hear young loneliness, identity crises, the obvious fear-fare in the chorus (”We try, but we don’t belong”), but then again I have no idea if that’s what Alexis Taylor’s really singing anyway. The impulse for every sound here—harp strums to synth solos to the intermittent glitch—is to explode, but every sound remains understated, artfully subdued. Maybe I’m selling Taylor’s lyrics short. Both remixers apparently like the understatement too. Cosmic Sandwich merely kills the vocals and abstracts the instrumental into slowburn French filter, somewhere between Maurizio and Robert Babicz. With twice the playtime, Alkan’s take is less a burn, more a patient inquiry into the original’s smaller sounds: the cymbal swells, the percussion shakers, the tinkering bells.

Astralwerks / ASW 59943
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