Pitchfork

It's practically a Brooklyn fairy tale: Sensitive dude makes hushed, lo-fi folk-pop in his Greenpoint bedroom after hearing just enough Iron & Wine. Dude has talented, arty friend who adds just enough arboreal, backwards-reverbed oddness to draw comparisons to the latest local avant-garde "scene" (other than noise, of course). The hirsute and horn-rimmed hordes rejoice; dudes reissue debut album with a disc of snazzy remixes by all their cool neighbors, plus some non-locals. Crotchety Pitchfork critic makes gratuitous opening Brooklyn references, claps hands, says "dude" too much.

Much of Horn of Plenty's sheepish beauty lay in Christopher Bear's eccentric blurrings of Edward Droste's naturally melodic, one-microphone campfire koans. At times The Remixes sharpens the focus on Droste's songwriting, which was often submerged in Bear's abyssal touches; Safety Scissors, for instance, accelerate the syrup-sopped "La Duchesse Anne", add buzzing, intermittently shuffling beats, and expose a catchy "do-do-do" leftfield pop gem. Simon Bookish makes the most immediately satisfying turn, adding a goofy new verse about "London Calling" and file-sharing to a clatteringly optimistic take on the wounded "Eavesdropping". Still other tracks-- such as Son's fuzzy "Shift" or Circlesquare's coruscating expansion of the same song (whistle-choir front and center, natch)-- serve to further abstract the originals.

Either way, The Remixes serves as a revelatory set of reinventions, while not a song-for-song do-over like Bloc Party's latest thingy. Listeners old and new are likely to find remixes they'll prefer over their forebears: not just Bookish's "Eavesdropping", but also Final Fantasy's "Don't Ask", which takes one of Horn of Plenty's most conventional tracks and dresses it up in strings and snug melodrama. Soft Pink Truth takes "A Good Place" all over the damn place-- underwater vox, "Slave 4 U" stripclub rhythms, meowing pet-store horn samples-- while concentrating on the song's evocative "blow by blow" lyric. And get me Jimmy Tamborello: Dntel does "Merge" as pulsing, wistful "Chariots of Fur" laptronica. Efterklang's opening "Campfire" rattles the halls of Rivendell with triumphant woodwinds that neuter the orig by comparison.

Helps, too, that so many of the artists featured aren't among remixing's usual suspects. First-time second-mixers Ariel Pink offer a droning, crackly "Disappearing Act", like "Our Prayer" Brian Wilson collaborating with Syd Barrett and then vanishing like the drum fills amid reverent, one-chord acoustic strums. Castanets apparently took "Deep Sea Diver" literally, plunging into three minutes of groaning, rippling guitar noise-- The Life Subaquatic! As in real fairy tales, freak-folk's emperors are sometimes accused of lacking clothes; Grizzly Bear's songs beguile however they're adorned.