Two Fingers My Friends!

Chronique

The year following the release of Dos Dedos Mis Amigos, Pop Will Eat Itself put out their companion remix album, featuring the entire record track for track remixed by a variety of techno, industrial, and dance-rock bods. Successful? As with most remix projects, some definitely worked better than others, while from a distance Two Fingers, My Friends is very much a product of its time and place. Could anything be more 1994 U.K.-centric than an album featuring the Orb, Renegade Soundwave, Fun^da^Mental, Loop Guru, Transglobal Underground, and Apollo 440, among others? A number of mixes fully tackle the songs in the band's own style -- "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" gets turned by Fun^da^Mental into pretty much its own song, even almost completely re-recording the vocals. Most of the best remixes come from the old pros, pumping up the strident electronic rock of the originals into something even more blasting. Foetus does his usual fine job on "Kick 2 Kill," stretching out the song and making the chorus even more of a roaring blast. Jah Wobble's ambient dub take on "Familius Horribilus" is a fun number as well, as is the Orb's expectedly playful dub revision of "Home," complete with bemusing '50s-era samples of smooth narrators talking about the joy of high-fidelity sounds. Perhaps the finest individual effort comes courtesy of Youth, who turns the already excellent "Everything's Cool" into an 11-minute slow-burn classic, a core techno beat swathed in everything from blaring sirens to moaning, mournful female vocals as a threatening atmosphere builds and builds. Other efforts of note include the Renegade Soundwave revamp of "Underbelly," turning the song into a slow film noir zoneout not far removed in parts from Bristol's trip-hop scene, and Hoodlum Priest's transformation of "Fatman" into a moody, ever-more-intense crawl of sound.

© Ned Raggett /TiVo