In a recent interview, Alt-J singer Joe Newman revealed that back in the group’s early and impoverished days in Cambridge they invented a game together which involved standing in a circle in their living room and chucking a water bottle at each other. In a fit of seemingly unironic inspiration, they gave this mammoth consumer of skint and bored hours the simple moniker of ‘Throwy’.
This story helps illustrate a large sliver of the band’s apparent appeal, an example of the rabid uncoolness that allows them to smuggle such machismo-free music so deep into the charts. Their junior IT manager presence makes for plenty of shade being thrown their way too (for a measure, see Pitchfork’s snarky review of RELAXER), but the trio wear it well, shrugging off the critical mush whilst consoling themselves by selling out the 20,000 seats of the 02 Arena in London.
Even they will have collectively snickered into their Chai Lattes though when the idea for turning their third album into a hip-hop orientated mash up was floated, but however unlikely REDUXER looked on paper, the skills of those crawling all over the carcass themselves can’t be called into question.
Some of the transformations are radical; perhaps deliberately it opens with OTG’s take on 3WW, which features Little Simz intoning with menace over an arid, claustrophobic stripping back of the original that renders it into an entirely different song. It’s not the only time the source is raided, with Lomepal delivering his rhymes entirely in French on a further alternate as the folky chorus emerges from amongst his gallic nonchalance.
It isn’t the only track to appear in more than one form either; the duplications of Hit Me Like That Snare, however, are more than vindicated, the Jimi Charles Moody edition a soulful-to-the-max late-night jam, booty call smooth, while Rejjie Snow’s closer recalls the hazy left-field vibe of Frank Ocean’s masterly rebirth for R&B, Channel Orange.
You sense that all three of them will be excited that the final product is so untethered from what most Alt-J fans would describe as normal; there’s more than an argument that REDUXER is more of a de facto side project than merely a hum-drum remix exercise. And in the best traditions of f***ing s**t up, it doesn’t all work – Trooko’s vocoder heavy take on Pleader ending up as a fistful of good ideas left searching for a home.
Even in this maze of tunes-within-tunes there are still certain things that can be relied upon, and in this case it’s the contagious energy of Danny Brown’s maverick rhyming, a sure-fire tool to make the good stuff great. He works on Deadcrush – a song already a little weird with its bizarre K-pop harmonies originally – and turns it into an imperious sounding banger, his on-the-money waxing predictably outstanding.
The cynics that love to mock Alt-J will see REDUXER as a blatant attempt for some distinctly unhip musicians to bask in the reflected cred of their collaborators, but pegging it is less straightforward than it seems – it certainly doesn’t feel like cultural tourism, but by contrast it isn’t totally full blooded either.
An interesting post-script to an album that confirmed them as unlikely stars, we can at least say that it’s definitely much more than fun than a game of Throwy.
