Challenger :: "Life In The Paint [Jesu remix]"

Challenger, creator of one of our favorite records of 2012, The World Is Too Much For Me, is hard at work on a yet untitled second LP. Having previewed the possible first single, sounding like a cross of Youth Lagoon's keyboard lushness and the throwback synths of the Reading Rainbow theme song, the second record stands to be as immense as the first. While awaiting new material, the band releases the Jesu remix of stand-out "Life In The Paint" with its glittering synths and spoken word sample, "Break up your fucking heart." Jesu removes the sample, turning up the bass and the moral victories on the buzzing re-imagining, isolating the guitar line in new, frigid relief. Like so much of the Challenger catalog, this aims somewhere back in our unremembered past, as singer John Ross invokes a seasonal reprise, "it's fall/it's fall again," before finally concluding, "this is fall/fall is here", the dying embers of a lost and complete world.