Not content with putting out new music less than a week ago, the boys from Bristol are at it again with another new offering for us to chew on. Well, a boy from Bristol to be more precise. IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen has put an industrial spin on the track “Switching On”, the recent single by fellow UK punks (and all-caps title toting band) LIFE.
Hello Bank Holiday, our brothers @idlesband have remixed Switching On and it’s being premiered over at @NME – go get some aural violence now! https://t.co/EPwDhJlNy9
— LIFE (@lifebanduk) May 25, 2020
March this year saw Hull natives LIFE follow up their second album (2019’s A Picture of Good Health) with the standalone single “Switching On”, a nervous, erratic retelling of the process of falling for someone. “I fell in love with you”, as the song’s visceral lyrics go, “when my eyes hit your face”. Accompanying the single came a suitably nervous and erratic music video (below), with director and frequent LIFE collaborator Shoot J Moore channelling as much Wes Anderson as Wes Craven.
In a statement on the song’s Bandcamp page, frontman Mez Green says that going into recording “the band wanted to be open to all aspects of musicality … we wanted to be brave, bold and exciting as we evolve our sound”. With all this in mind, “Switching On” could hardly be a template more ripe for reimagining, with IDLES’ Mark Bowen propelling the momentum of the original track into a digitally warped descendant of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”.
According to NME, IDLES’ Mark Bowen said: “I have watched LIFE play live well over 100 times and one thing that I really wanted to maintain through the remix is how incredibly tight they are as a band, so I left everything from the original in there. There was something new they were bringing with the song, there’s that assured LIFE sound central but there are experiments in electronics and noise coming closer to the surface.
“I wanted to push those ideas further, exaggerate them to the point of becoming violent. I often think a remix should eschew the original vocal, all my favourite remixes are unrecognisable as songs, that felt inappropriate here. Mez [Green] stays front and centre where he belongs”. Listen to the remix via SoundCloud below:
