Chicks On Speed: The Re-releases of the Unreleases

Chicks on Speed, three visual artists gone Euro techno in a new-wave meltdown, are doing just that. It is clever, ironic, postmodern, insufferable...take your pick. Their The Re-Releases of the Unreleases is album-as-process as much as it is album-as-product, consisting of 33 skits, fragments, remixes of tracks from the import-only Will Save Us All, and remixes of those remixes. It's a mess, but a shiny, futuristic one.

The human voice has always had an extraordinarily uneasy relationship with dance music. One minute, it's a diva fit for vogueing, the next, a sample looped to the beat, and the next, gone entirely. CoS collapse the tension by making their ice-cold, expressionless voices part of the process. On Glamour Girl, the cheeseball progressive house anthem (replete with keyboard arpeggiations and fist-pump breakdowns) is subverted when you realize that the diva-ness of this diva comes from a computer slicing and pitch-shifting her voice. And on Gimme Back My Man, one of two (!) B-52 covers, the Chicks' voices are Powerbook-morphed into the melody line, electronic tones, and even the beats, syllable by syllable.

The beats are Teutonic, mostly: minimal techno, house, and electro tweaking by Gerhard Potuznik and Patrick Pulsinger, crisp and cold enough to slice your ears off. Occasionally there's a punk edge, with screaming, sampled guitars, but the Chicks usually remain in the land of laptops, where fake reigns supreme.

"Got more faces than Cindy Sherman" goes a line on "Yes I Do," and CoS believe it. For them, there is no authenticity, just more mutable source material. In its relentless self-referentiality—CoS shout themselves out, constantly namecheck their producers, sing about Eurotrash and the "Rave Nation," and cut songs off before they even get started—Unreleases is convincing. But unlike, say, Sherman, CoS aren't necessarily proving anything except that they can get away with it. (K)

—Sam Frank

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