Birthday Ass are a Brooklyn-based assemblage led by vocalist and composer Priya Carlberg. The band specialize in absurdist art rock, free jazz and no wave, honing in on a skronky and colorful strain of surrealist punk akin to P.E., X-Ray Spex and Big Neck Police.
Birthday Ass’ bold and boisterous formula yielded their excellent Ramp Local debut Head of the Household earlier this year, so a full-pop, top 40 summer anthem remix only makes sense.
Humor is expected from a band called Birthday Ass, and not only is 4dboat’s remix of “K Helap” funny, it is also quite enjoyable. The new mix is impressive, bridging the hyperpop elements of the PC Music roster with late 2000s and early 2010s EDM – an oversaturated musical era just drying up for appropriate reassessment.
Birthday Ass drummer Jonathan Starks (aka 4dboat) flips the script on the Household closer by reworking the track into a sun-soaked club number ripe for getting plastered off watered-down screwdrivers in waist-high chlorine water under a scorching, merciless sun, but it’s also perfect for chilling — just chilling.
Starks drenches Priya Carlberg’s improvised vocals in autotune, auto-correcting the singer’s ad-libs in a tongue-in-cheek production trick that ends up sounding pretty neat. The combination is incredibly novel, and may just mark the very first time improvised vocals were coated with any sort of corrective effect. That is, of course, if we’re not counting the time that guy recorded the biblical amount of bird shit on those cars as improv.
4dboat’s absolutely wild remix of “K Helap” contains all the trance arpeggios, double-timed percussion and heavy drops that’ll collectively ask, “who do you know here?” The party has arrived and Birthday Ass has come to shake things up.