When I was in high school, I took a mandatory art class. It wasn't something that I wanted to do, and as I have very little artistic talent whatsoever, it served only to shatter my confidence and waste fifty minutes of every week that I could have much better spent doing something useful with my life. Normally, I oppose such compulsory education, but in this case, I think that I would support it for Death From Above 1979 just so that they might possibly get the same advice I was given when I attempted to reassemble a ceramic pot that had turned into a pile of rubble: "Cianan, you just can't polish a turd".

Death From Above 1979's last release, despite all the hype and indie cred surrounding the band, was almost the textbook definition of a musical turd. It was unsubtle, deserved to be flushed down the toilet, and it just plain stank. Not content with just inflicting that bunch of stinkers on us once though, the band for some reason has it in for us, and is inflicting them again in the form of a remix album. God help us all.

Luckily, most of the poor suckers that have been roped into actually doing some work on the band's "songs" seem to realise what a pointless endeavour it all is. Apart from those remixes that have actually been done by the band themselves under pseudonyms (and trust me, it's pretty easily to tell which ones), they're all for the most part fairly anonymous, generic efforts. A disco beat here, some thumping beats there... the sort of stuff that bands usually fill up CD singles with when they don't have any B-sides or demos left.

But it doesn't stop there, they've committed what is a cardinal sin as far as I'm concerned, and actually remixed the same song more than once, four times in the case of Black History Month. While I respect the remixers for attempting to make the song listenable, it's garbage-in, garbage-out as my old computers teacher said to me, and that particular song definitely qualifies as garbage.

There are also a few extra studio tracks and other miscellanea on this disc, but it's not really enough to justify purchase, even for those who have an abundance of scene points and claim to anyone who'll listen that Death From Above 1979 are the new leaders in minimalist-dance-metal or whatever it is that they claim to be producing. As my sports teacher during highschool said to me when it became evident that I simply cannot be rugby, "Cianan, there is no shame in quitting when you're crap". Advice that this band should take, I think.