Now I haven't heard the album yet, and so I can't pass judgement on it, but it's worrying when you see John Meagher giving it one out of five in the Irish Independent. Worrying and disappointing, because Fight Like Apes really did seem like a breath of fresh air when I first witnessed them live last year. Providing a much needed injection of colour and inventiveness to the domestic music scene, their excellent early releases - 'Jake Summers', 'Lend Me Your Face', 'Do You Karate?' - suggested a band with bags of potential, one reared on influences like the Breeders, Mclusky and Siouxie rather than Nick Drake or Joy Division.
However, the alarm bells started ringing for me when I heard the the way the three aforementioned songs had been remixed for the album. Quite simply, they've butchered them, adding a load of gratuitious, irritating sound effects, and polishing up the sound so that the lo-fi charm of the original versions has been completely lost. I really don't know why bands do this, if a song is good enough in the first place then why bother messing around with it? Nine times out of ten when bands do this, it's a bad idea. Unless of course it's a wholesale remix where you turn a rock song into a dance tune or whatever, but that's a different story.
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