Why I sacrificed a goat for Charli XCX on Thursday: The BRAT Remix Review
Sometimes I’m not sure how much I know about myself. In our age the self is punctured again and again by identity politics, late-stage capitalism, the cradle-to-casket conveyor belt we ride. Some nights I snap out of a haze and find myself staring into the steam-gauzed frame of my bathroom mirror. What am I looking for? I don’t know. Maybe a remix album. Because if there is one thing that is pinballing around in my ears as I’m stood, tears streaming down my face, looking for a reflection in the mist, it is this: I am a slut for a remix.
It’s true. At midnight on Thursday, 10th of October, Charli XCX’s long-considered-mythical, feverishly anticipated Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat dropped on streaming platforms, constituting the latest in a chain of acid green dominoes that have been falling since early June. Boasting an array of left-field features including Ariana Grande, Julian Casablancas, and Bladee, the 9 long months between the original BRAT drop and the remix album seem to have settled a receptive sweet spot online, with equal parts cynicism and diva worship infecting everything from Headrow House to presidential campaigns.
Power lies in a remix. And let me clarify, by remix I do not mean Cardi B’s verse on Despechá (foul) nor Ice Spice’s… noises …on Karma (wheelie bin on fire). Power lies in the risk of an artist taking their own record, shattering it on the ground and reassembling it with chewing gum and reverbed air horns. If I’m listening to a remix album, I’m expecting more than a rap verse. I want record-scratching, screaming, disharmony, jangliness, broken glass, animal noises, clashing melodies, hype tracks refigured as piano ballads and piano ballads as nu jungle. In all honesty, part of me gave into fear, holed up in my house for days with my door barricaded and my windows boarded up to avoid the leaks that any outdoor time might risk me hearing. But how silly I was! Rejoice! Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat is really weird. My heart sings.
From the first new track, “Club classics” with Spanish enemy of the people Bb trickz, the listener gets a sense of the space Charli is creating with this remix album. The track takes more from “365” than “Club classics”, painstakingly stacking sounds one-by-one until you’re smacked with the crescendo of a speed-increased, echoing verse which functions more as an accessory to the pace and rhythm than a Madonna-style “look! I am global!” token Spanish-language feature. But this is an album of dichotomies: in violent contract, “I might say something stupid featuring the 1975 and jon hopkins” takes shape as a subtle piano ballad that builds into a glitching, atmospheric thumper, an ode to loneliness that evolves the original record’s diary-style lyricism into layered, vulnerable curation. Matty Healy’s ‘I eat alone like a fly’ is pitted against Caroline Polachek’s ‘free bleeding in the autumn rain’ on a newly verdant and spooky “Everything is romantic”, against Casablancas’ ‘one for the abandonment’ on a risky, vocoder-heavy retune of “Mean girls”, and so on. The record unravels before you in a performance so erratically and perfectly brat that it’s difficult not to roll your eyes.
One thing which stands out in the remix record is the uncompromising and sometimes uncomfortable union of offensively experimental production choices and heartbreaking, cutting existentialism. In this sense, as far as I’m concerned, the remix record has only doubled down on the BRAT modus operandi. The self-abasement, the dirtiness, the anxiety, the intertextualism, the facade of languor distorting a sourdough starter of squirrelling creative restlessness, everything is amplified in a way where the testing the boundaries of ‘good taste’ that the original record represented is mutated into line-crossing, spasmodic creative freedom.
It’s easy not to have faith in this type of music. The BRAT methodology, being the composition of sparse sonic elements strung thinly together like a scavenged tarp over a rainforest shelter, does not inspire a wealth of passion when its recalibration is announced. But listening to BAICDBSB, the sense of satisfaction I felt was sublime; my expectations were met and exceeded. Charli has taken the spaces between those sonic elements, cut, pasted, and dressed them up, and unloaded a record that, true to form, says exactly what it is. Completely different but still brat. The self-awareness is what makes it.
And truthfully, the backlash we immediately saw bubbling up in reception to this record is what defines it, too. BRAT was always about being uncomfortable, uncompromising, artificial. The lyrics face-value and the production scratchy and aching. A Bon Iver remake languishing in the face of time passing against a choral background and a brief, eardrum-raking reincarnation of what was once the album’s cinematic, voyaging closer “365” was the only way Charli could keep her claws in the wriggling, mercurial, sardonic caricature she’s carved for herself in the pop landscape. This remix album was never made for the fans, nor the public – it was made to elicit groans and criticism, to underwhelm, to offend. Charli XCX’s celebrity profile is one that cannot be sustained without the enfant terrible approach that manifests her. A nicotine-fuelled, rag-wearing, ephemeral djinn smirking from your peripheral in the corner of the club as you jerk to the music, to satisfy would be to desecrate what she represents. To dissatisfy, for her, is to please.
If I could write a letter of thanks to this woman for this record, I would. I would fill an envelope with the blood of a sacrifical goat, and in the blood would be a Club Shy condom, and in the Club Shy condom would be a copy of Sartre’s Nausea I stole from my dead great aunt’s Bolton terrace, and on the contents page of Nausea would be a splodge of McDonald’s sweet chilli dip, and when you wiped away the dip there would be a shooting star and when Charli wished upon the star the entire world would dissolve into spacy metallic clanging and bisected guitar strings and whatever the fuck Henry Adams was writing about in The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) and we would all learn what it means to love again.
BAICDBASB is beauty. BAICDBASB is grace. And if one of you bastard trust fund baby DJs in Hyde Park don’t bump this at a house party this winter I will accidentally pour a pint over your Hercules Inpulse 300 and I will drunk shit in your ensuite. Take heed.
Words by Kyle Galloway.
