Heathered Pearls was exactly the right remixer for the Dirty Beaches song “Casino Lisboa.” The original, off the new album Drifters/Love Is the Devil, is like some latter-day, slow-motion amalgam of the Cramps and Consolidated, a world-weary dirge vocal amid the clank of self-consciously routinized industrial rock. In the Heathered Pearls edit (referred to somewhat casually as “Heathered Pearls’ dead time rework”), it is as if the track is being revisited in the memory of its remixer. Slivers of the vocal repeat like a song can when caught in the gears of the lizard brain. It ekes out a sense of forward momentum, but really just gets caught in its own circuitous loop. The result loses none of the embalmed spirit of the original, if anything emphasizing it. It does lose some choice moments from the source material, including a brief excursion into a guitar solo that sounds more like the wind brushing a metal fence, but the trade off is worth it.
Here is the original “Casino Lisboa,” in the form of its mesmerizing video:
Remix originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/heathered-pearls. Heathered Pearls is Jakub Alexander. Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai. More from Hungtai/Beaches at dirtybeaches.blogspot.com.