Minus The Bear

Interpretaciones Del Oso

[4/5] With their love of squiggly time signatures and quirky keyboards, Minus The Bear always seemed like the perfect candidate for a remix record. But it’s still a pleasant surprise to hear just how good the Seattle band’s 2005 album, Menos El Oso, sounds all chopped ’n’ screwed as Interpretaciones Del Oso. Perhaps this is because the remixers-which include members of Pretty Girls Make Graves, Crystal Skulls and the Blood Brothers-put a unique spin on Menos by extracting the best bits of its songs. “Pachuca Sunrise,” already a laid-back, homesick lament, becomes even more wistful in the hands of Alias, who adds trip-hop beats and highlights Jake Snider’s lonely vocals. The P.O.S. redo of “Drilling” slices the song’s driving beats and melody into a series of robotic stutters, while Fog’s slow, spooky version of “Memphis & 53rd” plays up ominous urgency. Even the Interpretaciones tunes that don’t resemble the originals-Dark Baby (aka Crystal Skull Yuuki Matthews) envisions “Hooray” as a b-boy jam driven by cheesy ’80s synths, while Blood Brother Morgan Henderson laces cinematic orchestral touches throughout “The Pig War”-are enjoyable. Of course, when the raw material is so good, no wonder the mixed-up results are just as exciting. (SUICIDE SQUEEZE) Annie Zaleski

ROCKS LIKE:

DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…

Four Tet’s Rounds

Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm Remixed

IN-STORE SESSION with vocalist/guitarist JAKE SNIDER

How did this project come about?

We licensed the record [Menos El Oso] for some overseas releases, and generally on those they want some kind of a bonus track. We didn’t have any extra material at the time, so we asked Kento [Oiwa], this friend of ours that’s in this band IQU, if he would want to remix the song “This Ain’t A Surfin’ Movie.” He did it, and it was fantastic. Because we enjoyed that remix so much, we started thinking, “What if we just started getting people to do ’em, see if we can get every single track done?”

How closely did you work with the remixers on the album?

Almost not at all. We just gave them the music and then when we got the remix back, that was it. We just put whatever they gave us on there.

Was it nerve-wracking at all, wondering what people were going to do with your songs?

Yeah, definitely. There’s some tracks that I think are more successful than others, there’s some tracks that don’t even at all resemble the original music. You never know what somebody’s going to do-and that’s exactly the point. We wanted to not even produce it at all, not even be involved with the creative part of revisiting the songs.

What was your reaction when you first heard the remixes?

It was so different on each one. Some of them, I needed to kind of listen to a bunch of times to understand what they were doing. You have to look for different things than you expect sometimes.

What ended up being your favorite track?

I’ve got a top three, probably. I love the Alias remix of “Pachuca Sunrise”-I almost like it better than the song, maybe I do-and the P.O.S. remix of “Drilling” is fantastic and brutal. Fog did “Memphis & 53rd” and it’s sinister. It works really well with the lyrics-he made it seem evil.

Can you see Minus The Bear adding styles like this to future music?

Hopefully. Maybe on the next tour that we do, [we can] get at least one of the artists that we worked with to come on the tour with us. I’d love to play a couple songs similar to the way that they turned out on the record. That would be a cool change. Like the Alias one would be perfect, it would translate really well to live music. -Annie Zaleski