When there are four musicians in a band it can sometimes happen that each member brings their own personality to the table - groping towards an original formula that their audience will recognise as uniquely their own. With »Faking The Books«, Lali Puna's most successful album, the band found themselves collectively pulling towards a cohesive and original sound that allowed their confidence to ring out louder and more completely than it had ever done before.
But sometimes there are ideas that fall outside the delicate boundaries of an album. Sometimes there are songs that don't fit that particular remit, songs that need their own unusual platform on which to flourish.
»I Thought I Was Over That« is the playful offspring of a band finally confident enough to re-visit their most daring, misfitting, individually conceived moments to date. It's also an opportunity to look at those artists who have inspired them in one way or another over the years, pressing them to develop through remixes, collaborations and cover versions where their ideas blossomed from raw material provided by other artists – and vice versa.
The list of luminaries is impressive – starting off with Tim Simenon's long-dormant Bomb The Bass, dragged out of hibernation for Lali's tantalising collaboration on »Clear Cut«. Leftfield hip-hop producer's Alias and Boom Bip explore the meeting point between two seemingly incongruent generic paths, while Canadian beat supremo Sixtoo adds a previously unreleased remix of »Small Things« to his already vastly impressive oeuvre. Andrew Weatherhall and Keith Tenniswood, longtime admirers of Lali Puna, explore this symbiosis with two wonderfully different entries finding each band reworking the other, while Jimmy Tamborello's genre-defying Dntel snuggle up comfortably alongside post-rock originators To Rococo Rot (both bands here pitching new remixes that are exclusive to this compilation), and Iso 68's Thomas LeBoeg undertakes the art of reduction for his mesmerising remix of »Nin-com-pop«. even Valerie Trebeljahr's voice is subject to these daring maneuvers, with Flowchart's remix of »Fast Forward« it mutates into a human beatbox that turns the band's usual rules of engagement on their head - and yet the music still retains that unmistakable identity.
And as if to whet the apettite, two brand new tracks were recorded for this collection. »The Failure Of The Leading Sign Industry« is a short instrumental piece that's swathed in layers of static and barely discernable emissions. This is a shrude introduction, highlighting their collective interest in even the most personal, miniature, outsider sounds. »Past Machine« is another brand new exclusive – originally written for the late, great John Peel, perfecting the band's line in uplifting melancholy that offsets a classic hook with a simple tale of time passing out of reach, the stagnant lyrics overflowing with an ennui that's impossible to contain. Despite the weariness of the subject matter, this is easily one of the band's catchiest ever tracks, a juxtaposition that's just classic Lali Puna.
And this brings us straight back to the beginning. Unlike so many female-led indie-pop outfits over the years, Lali Puna's music has an underlying self reflection that defies the saccharine coating you might mistakenly register on first listen. These songs shy away from tales of girly broken hearts and bubblegum storyboards, instead exposing a world-weariness – an ›Aging out of time‹ that's often at odds with the adrenaline the band ignite musically. its on the experimentations, collaborations, deviations and remixes found on this album, however, that this mood is offset against its most startling backdrop – allowing the band to get lost in different sounds, ideas and interventions... and still find their way home.
