A Year of Music

On a whim, I picked up the recent remix releases for Thom Yorke's The Eraser, never having heard the original album. It was mostly on the strength of the remixers, or rather on the strength of Surgeon and Burial's names. I'd already heard the Surgeon remix in one of his semi-legendary DJ sets, which actually works better on its own than in the mix (Thom's singing is too narrative to work in a set of the kind of micro-precise, 1-bar techno / dubstep / electro Surgeon prefers), so mostly I was wondering how the Burial mix turned out. And hey presto, it turns out to be a Burial song. And a Thom Yorke song. The two songs aren't completely immiscible, but there's less meshing than simple mixing. Nevertheless, I love it, because I love how Yorke imparts a contradictory sense of urgency and resignation to the vocals, and I've yet to hear Burial to do his thing in a way that's not almost oppressively lovely. He could very easily run out of gas with this schtick, but he hasn't yet.