- There are times when dance music's habitual manipulations of the human voice can come off as probing and significant and genuinely philosophically profound; there are also times when the same can be just altogether too embarrassing to want to acknowledge or even bear. But it must be done, or at least can't be resisted. And it shouldn't, either: Who doesn't love or maybe even need some embarrassingly tacky and/or just stupid vocal tweakage every now and then? But still: "I Love U So" by French-house icons Cassius is too much, with its helium-pitched assertions of a love wholly unconvincing and its slapdash arrangement of disparate sounds that points to the fine line between disorienting collage and just plain grating pastiche.
The remixes here are a mixed bag, too. Bowski's "2 AM Remix" slots the Cassius track into a tauter and tidier house format, but doesn't do well by a spot halfway through that drops everything out in favor an acappella turn that falls disastrously flat. A mix by Skream goes for old-school hardcore mania, with revved-up rave piano and a splashy breakbeat, but it doesn't get much further than the mere idea of it. From there "I Love U So" gets a break, with the rest of this EP given over to a spacey, spangly Gesaffelstein remix of "Les Enfants" and "Shark Simple" as reimagined by L-Vis & The Neon Dreams, mostly as strangely sputtering disco with sloppy drums.