Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Blood Orange: "Uncle Ace (a/jus/ted Remix)"

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Blood Orange: "Uncle Ace (a/jus/ted Remix)" Posted: 16 Apr 2014 02:12 PM PDT   One of 2013's highlights, Blood Orange's "Uncle Ace" detailed the plight of NYC's LGBT homeless youth, loosed to drift through the city at the witching hour. With Dev Hynes' sympathetic eye and ear, it was a song at once "mysterious, desperate, empathetic" (as Ryan Dombal's review triangulated it), set against a fierce disco number full of tireless hi-hats and a stinging guitar riff. For this remix of "Uncle Ace," Hynes called on NYC DJ/dance music legend Justin Strauss, who has touched up dance tracks for over thirty years and works with Teddy Stuart as a/jus/ted. The duo expand the original to a glorious nine minutes, switching out the euphoric Bohannon groove of the original for an electronic throb more kin to a dark alleyway, the melody of the original is now conveyed via piano chords that serve as beacon for the dark matter at the song's core. Strauss and Stuart tease it all out ever so slowly, judicious in their use of handclaps, cowbells, the 80s-era synths that linger at the edges, making for one of this year's most evocative remixes.