DM Stith – Heavy Ghost: Appendices

Following emphatic praise for 2009’s Heavy Ghost, DM Stith presents its Appendices – two discs of remixes, demos and covers. Such an extensive document may seem indulgent, but these odds and ends work well enough together to warrant their separate release. With the single-disc review copy shuffling together a random assortment from across the twenty-two tracks, consistency and sequencing are difficult to gauge, but quality certainly isn’t in doubt.

Covers of Diane Cluck’s Easy To Be Around and Randy Newman’s Suzanne are skewed through Stith’s distinct aesthetic, the latter adding ghostly loops and backing vocals to Newman’s twisted narrative. Better still is Be My Baby, delivered with an unsettling Doveman-style minimalism that recasts the lovers’ ode as a stalker’s demand. These help Appendices shrug the yoke of curio and stand firm as a worthy release in its own right, though Heavy Ghost itself remains the newcomer’s first port of call. [Chris Buckle]