Darkness twists and darkness pulls, and sometimes synths can shower us enough until we drown, forced to swim outside our trapped, little worlds. Those kinds of synths turn the production into a firehose, and they always inevitably fail any time they try and force a Phantogram song to be anything other than what it inherently feels at its core structure, it must fucking be.  I’ve written many times about you can’t push Phantogram out of their darkness, because they’re not interested in escaping it. I’m not sure they’d even know what to do on the outside wall of that fortress. Which isn’t to say that they won’t get there…someday….but goddamnit, let people have as long as they want to dwell in worlds that feel esoteric and wonderful.

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So I almost always avoid remixes of Phantogram. I’m not interested in someone perverting them. But, I knew Until The Ribbon Breaks would never do that. If anything, he’s as close a kin as Phantogram have on the scene at the moment. Which is why they both made it onto my top 20 songs of last year.  His Taste of Silver EP is rife with songs that swirl within sadness and punch towards a hole in the sky, escaping to light, but only when necessary. He has a killer knack at finding the emuluous, rival emotions underlying the ‘happy’ cores of poppy songs–his work on Tegan and Sara’ s “Closer” still astounds me.

His re-imagination of “Fall In Love” is a masterclass in finding the hidden emotion of a song and letting it float to the surface. His synths are so gentle that they feel monk like, water-bending the dark emotions on a sound-stream  of their own sighs into a pool of bubbling, scintallating air just below a sunspot on the surface of the water.  It’s not telling them where to go, just making it clear that there are options. And since this, of all of Phantogram’s songs, is the one most aching for the forgiveness of light, is a stellar re-imagination of their messaging. Call off the remix contest guys, UTRB already won.

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