Dean and Britta - White Horses

(Sonic Cathedral, 2007)

Dean and Britta jump into the 7” game with two versions of a track from Back Numbers, their most recent LP. Wareham has always come across a sober and wry/pointed grown-up in his music – even back to Galaxie 500 – but his post-Luna work, while occasionally pretty, has become suffocatingly adult to me, de-emphasizing guitars and wrapping itself in polite cocktail-party production and Lee-and-Nancy-isms that are smoothed of any edge. Here, Britta handles vocals on the typically gentle “White Horses,” a comatose lounge-popper that gets tweaked for the single with the substitution of French lyrics. No great shakes. On the other side, Sonic Boom hardly reinvents the wheel with his remix, but he does transform the song from an E-Z listening clunker into something quite nicely toasted, an undulating, echo-laden blissout that’d make for swell pool-floating music. Whereas the original begged to be relegated to background muzak, Sonic’s mix – particularly because of the clatter he adds to the percussion – demands the listener’s attention, even while it soothes the ol’ brain.