It’s rare that I cover singles in the review section, and when I do, they have to be very special indeed. This one definitely is. This week in 2002, Röyksopp seemed to appear pretty much out of nowhere, with this gem.
Of course, their appearance wasn’t really quite that sudden. Over the preceding year or so, the singles Eple and Poor Leno had each appeared at least once already, and the album had been floating around in the lower reaches of the charts for some time as well, but this was the moment they really found fame.
The Someone Else’s Radio Mix of Remind Me is sublime. Whereas the original album version was a simple lounge piece which plodded along very pleasantly with a great vocal from Erlend Øye, this version brings enormous retro synth backing, and adds an actual chorus. Röyksopp have recorded some fantastic songs in the fifteen years that have followed, but nothing has ever been quite this good.
So Easy comes next. It wasn’t originally going to be on the single, but then the BT advert appeared in the UK, with the huge baby’s face, one of those adverts that you probably still remember today, and so it had to be included. It’s a great track, which only falls down slightly when you realise quite how much it’s been stretched out in order to last three and a half minutes. But aside from that, it’s really rather beautiful.
James Zabiela‘s Ingeborg mix of Remind Me closes the first CD, a pleasant chilled out version which adds urban samples and an enormous bass line to the original album version, but doesn’t quite have the shine of the single version. But that would be asking a lot – this is still excellent.
There’s really very little to fault here, with a beautifully designed CD sleeve showing cloud nestling, probably in a fjord or something, two great versions of Remind Me, and the adorable So Easy as well.
Unfortunately the second disc is a bit of a waste, and seems to have been thrown together a little too quickly – we get the album version of So Easy again, followed by the album version of Remind Me, before finally getting Tom Middleton‘s Cosmos mix of the main track, a long house version which isn’t quite as good as the remixer’s reputation would make you think it should be.
Worth tracking down are the 12″ versions, which bring you Someone Else’s Club Mix of Remind Me, which I suspect might have been an interim version between the album and radio mixes, and also Ernest Saint Laurent‘s Moonfish mix, which is probably as close as anything on this album can get to electro, but at the same time pulls some of the more chilled elements out from the album version.
If anything in Röyksopp‘s early years helped shape the sound of future albums The Understanding and Junior, I suspect it was the remix of Remind Me which led this single. It’s extraordinarily good, and is definitely worth owning in its own right.
If you prefer to buy new, the best you can manage now seems to be an oddly tagged collection of MP3s here. Otherwise track down the original CD release, which may or may not be here.
Music for stowaways 