Marcel Winatschek

Blue Light Was Never Coming Back Anyway

Bloc Party are one of those bands I stopped needing to defend years ago—they just are. Silent Alarm hit at exactly the right moment, and even as they moved toward the colder, more fractured geometry of Intimacy, I stayed with them without complaint.

The Intimacy remix album was due in May, and Armand Van Helden’s rework of Signs came out ahead of it as a free download—which is how music should occasionally arrive, no friction, no ceremony, just here it is. Van Helden strips the track back and rebuilds it as something more mechanical and patient, not quite dance music and not quite anything else, occupying the specific no-man’s-land that remix culture loves to colonize. The video is strange in a way that doesn’t fully explain itself, which is fine.

It’s not the Blue Light remix. Nothing is the Blue Light remix—that thing rewired a small part of my brain permanently and I’ve never fully recovered. But this is a solid Tuesday-evening listen, which is its own category of recommendation.