Below is a remix of Gawker favs Niki & the Dove's "DJ, Ease My Mind," by Gawker favs Twin Shadow. Mr. Shadow strips the song of its furiously swirling house and surrounds it with a plaintive electric guitar and some other atmospheric effects. Voila: a dance song becomes a ballad. It's an effective trick, but kind of a cheat: many dance songs are ballads at heart and to place them in such a straightforward setting is ultimately reductive. For that reason, I have come to loathe Frente!'s alternahit cover of New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle." Yeah, we get it: the song is sad. We don't need your weeping guitar to prove what has been conveyed in a more exciting and complex manner.

This week, the debut album from Swedish weirdos (Sweirdos?) Niki & the Dove, Instinct, was released digitally in the United States. Swirling in influences that seem to range from the Knife to superstitions to a pile of twigs, Instinct is a creepy, pulsating electronic beast that manages ultimately to sound just left of standard pop. Confounding, fantastical lyrics abound, but my favorite moments come in the more straightforward offerings whose subtle weirdness manages to creep under skin with a stealth tenacity.