Just so you know – four songs go up today, and then three tomorrow…

[Website]
[5.90]

Martin Kavka: I went to London for the first time in 1992, and spent most of my time being quite surprised that it didn’t feel like the original version of this song. From Brixton to Bloomsbury and between, London has never felt like any one signifiable thing to me, just a whole bunch of disparate fragments. So I’m happy that Richard X has taken this overdetermined and overanalyzed track, and with a simple bassline, made it even slinkier and spanglier. It is — and always was — simply cosmopolitan.
[10]

Ramzy Alwakeel: Decade’s market leader in compressed electro takes on 1991 inadvertent high-class DIY anthem. The lead single from the Foxbase Beta remix project is a pleasant, highly uncontroversial listen, but I’m not sure that such an unashamed fanboy exercise really needs promo. If you saw Foxbase Alpha live, you’ll probably enjoy this pulsing, handclap-laden update. If you’re not a fairly comprehensive Saint Etienne fan, you literally won’t care.
[7]

Alex Macpherson: As artistically bankrupt as a Don’t Look Back concert or endlessly reissues of a band’s back catalogue, this exists for no purpose than to serve the nostalgia industry. Which wouldn’t grate so much — I never hate on people getting their paper, we all have to one way or the other — except the particular fanbase which fetishises these two acts tends to shout very loudly about how they love POP! Maybe even…perfect pop, with all that phrase’s dodgy connotations. But if you really think that this is the best that Saint Etienne, Richard X and 2009 have to give, you should stop kidding yourself. (It was still a great song, mind. Was. Nearly two decades ago.)
[4]

Pete Baran: Not quite sure why anyone would want an extended remix which sounds like an original 12″ mix. The song is great, remains great and this mix is almost the dictionary definition of superfluous. How do you score something near perfection that hasn’t really been fucked with? Maybe average the score I would have given it (10) with the irrelevance of the remix (0)…
[5]

Martin Skidmore: Richard X’s pulsing electro additions here fortunately do not overwhelm the irresistible keyboards or the singing on Saint Etienne’s first single, from 1990. I’m not sure that the song’s delicacy is benefitted by extra layers or length, but it’s still pretty wonderful.
[8]

Keane Tzong: “Foxbase Beta” is a great idea, but one that works a bit better on, well, all the other songs on the album than on this, perhaps by dint of its being a reinterpretation of another’s song to begin with (like Telephone, but with record productions?). It’s a nice little reswizzle of the original, and nothing is ruined/everything remains quite definitely listenable… but there’s an unambitiousness to the mix that disappoints, faintly and vaguely.
[7]

Matt Cibula: LOVE the original, maybe Neil Young’s best slow jam. Liked it when St. E remade it. This version, for some reason, bores the bejeezus-monkeys out of me.
[3]

Melissa Bradshaw: Even the piano and the reverb, the only remaining pleasures, have been glazed over with a suffocating electro sheen. Give me Kylie’s take on Saint Etienne anyday.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Since the original version lived and died on how the of-its-time shufflebeat prodded the anonymous disco dolly to a distracted froth — the most devastating response to Neil Young’s male angst — I didn’t have much patience for this one’s “updates.” When I want acoustic strums I’ll listen to the damn Young version.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: I never really warmed to the Alpha mix of this and this reworking only brings the song forward a decade, leaving it stuck between good memories and still being dated. Less timeless than seemingly endless.
[6]