Stabbing Westward
Wither – ReWired
COP International
Re-recording a classic album is a risky proposition for any band or artist. Even leaving aside the shady practice of creating soundalike recordings to get in on streaming and sync royalties, the upside of recreating your own work is dubious; technically better performances, recording or production isn’t an improvement when a classic LP’s appeal is in familiarity, shortcomings and all. The best case scenario is that you come up with an interesting alternate take on your own material, but the more common outcome is sounding like a cover band.
Thankfully, in the case of Stabbing Westward’s Wither – ReWired, a completely new version of the band’s 1996 breakthrough sophomore album Wither, Blister, Burn + Peel, the band have taken an approach that justifies the endeavor. Signed during the industrial rock’s brief moment of mainstream relevance in the 90s, the original record had catchy songs and benefited hugely from frontman Christopher Hall’s oh-so dramatic alt-rock vocals, but notably buried the majority of the band’s electronic elements beneath mountains of guitar chug. Wither – ReWired addresses that in a way that merely doing a new mix of the original tapes (if that were even an option) couldn’t, by not just recreating, but fully rearranging the songs to give the programming and synthwork equal billing.
The results are striking in an A to B comparison of each version. Tracks that felt like lesser moments such as opener “I Don’t Believe” and “Crushing Me” are given a whole new life, the former by wedding a strong programmed rhythm section to the proceedings, the latter by upping the tempo and dialing back the original’s turgid guitars in favour of a sharp, forward moving arrangement. In the case of the record’s best and most memorable moments, such as the rock radio hit “What Do I Have to Do?”, things are left well enough alone, with minor tweaks to programming and the mix to keep it consistent with the rest of the record’s sound. In fact, they stick so close to how you expect those cuts to sound that the small changes stick out; Hall changes some of his vocal phrasing on the chorus to “Shame” in a way that feels wrong at first, but becomes comfortable after a few listens.
The other important aspect of Wither – ReWired is in how its songs are sequenced as a listening experience. Where the 1996 original frontloads the record’s singles and most commercial cuts, the new version places songs in an order that feels like it makes more sense. “Slipping Away” is moved from the closing spot, its new club-ready iteration placed to pick things up from the mid-tempo melodrama of “Why?”, replaced by a revamped version of B-side “Agekata (Dawn)” whose more atmospheric synth textures better fit the role. “So Wrong” and “Inside You” (a deep cut that is secretly one of the band’s best moments) have significant time shaved off and are placed to keep the momentum and emotion of the record up leading into the final third.
The amount of effort into making a genuinely new, but not unfamiliar album are considerable, and act as evidence that this is anything but a cash-in. Stabbing Westward could have churned out a quick and dirty version of their live set in studio and called it a day, but instead Wither ReWired is a genuinely considered undertaking by a band who understand who they were, who they are, and how to reconcile the thirty year gap in those incarnations.
