Critical Beats - It’s In Our Hands

Björk’s “It’s In Our Hands”, the new single off her Greatest Hits album, is probably one of her strongest to date, pulling together elements she always uses, but rarely nestled together quite so snugly : chirping and chiming, glitch-inspired skip rhythms and deep aquamarine strings swirling beneath her untethered vocals. Matmos’s “Arcade Mix” turns the tune into something very different, gutting the track’s lush interior and installing an accordioning drum pattern — extending and shrinking like the neck on a robot turtle — that sounds, in its clap-happy clatter, like a sci-fi version of the Diwali rhythm. On the other side, Matmos’s Drew Daniel, who co-produced the tune with Björk, offers up a Soft Pink Truth mix that’s nominally electro, though its vast array of hammerheaded analogue stabs, hamfisted handclaps and ‘DSPed to death’ vocal treatments is far stranger than almost anything else filed under the term. Not to mention far more gloriously sinister and exponentially more fun.