Fluke are back!

[WhiteNoise]

FLUKE - THE SECOND BITE

I finally listened to this last night on a bike ride around Indy and it was fantastic. What a lovely return. Sometimes remakes like this don't make their case, but every single track felt like it had a reason to exist. Bullet has never sounded better! The house-ification of The Bells is fun, maybe a new definitive version next to Mix 3 or the Out (In Essence) versions. Few nitpicks, the beats on Atom Bomb could be bigger and I kept waiting for the Whitewash strings to show up in Absurd. I'm very glad they went with the old Thick N Creamy version of Groovy Feeling, even though I wish they'd done a little hybrid of that and the album version (or the excellent Mr Whippy version). They do so many excellent versions it's impossible to pack them in. Overall fantastic. Can we get a Third Bite?

These sound like the sort of remakes you'd make if you were putting together a new live show and I sure hope that's the case. If anything, I just hope this takes off enough for them to make a little comeback like that. Seems like their promotional strategy is to slip Ian Anderson a couple hundos for some odd visuals on social media. Always respect going independent but I wish there was a better promotional push behind. They deserve a bigger release for this. Fluke always deserved more.

[Enjoyed]

Always respect going independent but I wish there was a better promotional push behind. They deserve a bigger release for this. Fluke always deserved more.

This is my biggest concern. This album has been a little more successful, I'd argue, in terms of making a splash. But not enough for what it really should be. SO many people for sure remember this band and know a bunch of these tunes from back in the day, but it feels like unless you are one of us weirdos still listening to Tosh (Gosh) on a weekly basis, and ever hungry for more Fluke - you're just not going to stumble across this in a meaningful way.

I would LOVE a live show. But I'm not holding out any hope, unfortunately.

Glad you managed to give the album a spin! I've been diving back in here and there since it came out. Super fun all round.

They also put out a couple of interesting Daniel Avery remixes:

Don't love 'em - but I think like some of the recent, weaker Chems remixes, it's nice for there to be another avenue for people to discover the band.

[WhiteNoise]

I'm digging the Nuclear Summer version.

Yeah - I wish the Daniel Avery connection had resulted in The Second Bite getting released through Phantasy or Domino.

[WhiteNoise]

This has me digging back into the Fluke discog, a rewarding thing!

Squirt is a nice track from the Oto / Risotto period. The single came with an incredible pedal-to-the-floor Euripicopalamix that bears zero resemblance to the original:

I just found out this remix was originally a Fluke remix of Stereo by Spooky (Charlie May) that went unreleased, due to some record label shenanigans. No wonder I loved it so much. And no wonder it sounds like it has nothing to do with Squirt. This production was snuck out in two forms, the above (under the guise of a Squirt remix) and below, the unreleased remix did see daylight on a pretty good prog DJ mix / compilation. There's more of Spooky in this one:

On a similar note, good memories of Fluke's remix of Hyperballad remix of Bjork:

Story goes that their first attempt at the remix was a very dancefloor friendly version which was embraced by the record label but rejected by Bjork, who loved their final more spacey version above. Fluke later got permission to release a mostly instrumental version of the original as "Bjango", under their alias Lucky Monkeys, which got some good remixes of its own. Great in every form, pretty much: