Dead Leaf Echo: Verisimilitude
2&1 Records

‘Twas but a half-year ago that Truth entered the world courtesy of Brooklyn outfit Dead Leaf Echo, and while that album's songs are still fresh in memory, a follow-up now appears in the form of remix versions of the earlier album's material. The new release finds three songs by the band (in its current form, singer-guitarist LG, guitarist-keyboardists Ana B. and Christo B., and drummer J. Parker) getting makeovers by RxGibbs, Elika, Mark Van Hoen, and others in a six-track, half-hour EP (100 hand-numbered copies available).

Truth's most memorable song, “Half-Truth,” is the beneficiary of three overhauls, with the lead-off Fryer remix the one most closely hewing to the original, specifically in retaining two of its signatures, the narcoleptic vocal and the rat-a-tat snare pattern. What's new is the rather more electro-fied character that the synthesizer elements add to the song's already potent shoegaze swoon and that help shift the original's focus to synth-laced dreampop. Elika's version is a heavier affair that doesn't dispense with the serenading vocal but undergirds it with a grungy, machine-funk lurch. The Spry! treatment exchanges the original's drum track for a breezier attack whose percussive accents crackle with whiplash-like intensity. RxGibbs' “Falling Away Dub” of “Act of Truth” drenches the dreamscape in an immense, vocal-heavy sea of reverb until a brief breakdown allows the bass line to assert the song's dubby persona. Prodded by a throbbing bass pulse, the DLE treatment lurches at a drugged-out half-speed tempo that brings its trippy vocals and radiant synth flourishes all the more into the spotlight. Mark Van Hoen's “Woolgathering” remix darkens the original's skies with fuzz-toned washes and a slow-motion trip-hop pulse that give the track a shoegaze-from-hell vibe and transform Dead Leaf Echo into something vaguely suggestive of a vampiric, modern-day Tommy James and the Shondells. Though Verisimilitude is, of course, a release designed in part to tide the band's fans over until the next release of original material, it's nevertheless a solid enough collection and re-presentation of the group's sound that's less intended to supplant or compete with Truth than complement it.

August 2011