Dennis Bovell’s remix of “The Smoke” highlights all the right elements

Dub mix of the Radiohead side-project The Smile amplifies and extends all the best parts of their 2nd single

I’ve been sitting on a draft of this for like a month and a half and was going to just skip it because it’s a Radiohead-side project featuring the two most famous guys that could have a Radiohead-side project. You know, if you cared about that sort of thing then you probably heard this already. BUT. butbutbut, 1) this is the least-played track on their Spotify and 2) this is killer.

The Smile’s original version of “The Smoke” is a kind of a pretty little post-punk tune — I think I thought of it as something that’d be on a late-90’s emo 7” (maybe like a really really good one on Southern). Nice little bassline. I thought it was cool but I didn’t pay it enough attention to get it.

“The Smoke” is completely transformed in the hands of long-time UK dub producer Dennis Bovell. It’s not uncommon for a contemporary dub mix to transform a song —that’s kind of the whole point these days. Those Mad Professor remixes of Massive Attack are really just straight remixes (i.e., grabbing parts that interest the producer and then building a whole new track from them) with dub sounds and effects mixed in. This is an actual dub mix in the classical sense of the term: Bovell took the original song, beefed up the bass and drums so that they’re now the song and then plays with the elements. All of the treble-y stuff — Thom Yorke’s voice, the horns, the guitars— float in and out of the mix while Bovell plays with the percussion. He never adds anything to the song, he just manipulates the elements through echo, EQ, and stop-start cuts. The end result is that it feels like a completely different tune while being remarkably faithful to it’s source material.

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