Sunny Day Sets Fire, Stranger Remix EP

Sunny Day Sets Fire plays with a colorful sound palette derived from their respective places of origin: Sardinia, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, and London. If only our little world was as harmonious as this quintet. Their Stranger Remix EP gives us the band’s original “Stranger” times four, plus more. The layout of “Stranger” is a uniformly upbeat, melodic trip.

The first track is the original. Play it once, and if you don’t end up breaking out into a full jog down the street, you’ll at least tap your feet. Mauro Remiddi gives us atmospheric vocals and seems lost in the theme of his own music: some kind of time-can-go-to-hell love I can’t more specifically identify. He strikes me as the kind of guy who wears the same outfit everyday because it works, but nothing too garish. Not to draw any ridicule upon him, mind you — on the contrary, I applaud his formula, giving us a whimsical psych-pop beating with kid gloves. No raunchy machismo to deal with.

And what connections he must have, tapping the Slips and The Cool Kids for “Stranger” remixes and Mad Decent, Baron von Luxxury, CSS, and XXXChange for other tracks. Each has its own way of making goo-goo eyes. The superior version of “Stranger” on the album is that by the Slips, with the most disappointing being The Cool Kids’. The latter’s take on “Stranger” is a casual slaughter of SDSF’s bouncy tune, resulting in a drunken mix of nightsounds.

As for other tracks on the album, there’s the CSS Remix of “Wilderness,” mainlining ’80s pop beats, and Baron Von Luxxury’s bordello-friendly “Brainless.” The bunch claims on their Myspace page that this EP will be enough “to make you burn your passport and declare yourself a converted citizen of the world.” I sense a remix of “It’s a Small World After All” coming.