I doubt that most artists enjoy selecting their greatest hits for a package like this. More often than not, these collections are forced by market necessities, imply the end of an era, and lead to inevitable bifurcation between fan favorites and the label's idea of a hit. Imagine, then, the enormity of such undertaking for a songwriter whose shtick involves both unflagging self-admiration and utter contempt for labels, marketing, colleagues and fans.

I'm talking, of course, about the UK's Luke Haines, the leader of the defunct Auteurs and, with John Moore, the creator of the minimalist-pop project Black Box Recorder. Evidently facing a contract obligation to ransack his old band's four albums for a hits package, Haines found a conceptually flawless way out: He rented out a symphony orchestra and proceeded to re-record eight of Auteurs' songs in nauseatingly grand, mellow-gold arrangements that most definitely do not have to be heard to be believed.

Das Capital: The Songwriting Genius of Luke Haines and the Auteurs is a primo Situationist stunt. From the title on down, it concerns itself purely with the sound of money.

As any piece of conceptual art Haines claims to despise so, Das Capital is primarily valuable as a conversation catalyst. As a piece of self-assessment, it's useless: Haines' liner notes bring to mind Nabokov's Strong Opinions, wherein Vladimir Vladimirovich spares a couple of kind words for Joyce, but only for Ulysses. Haines operates in a similar mode here. He assigns his albums short captions ("my second masterpiece") and stars (most get five out of five), obliterates any suggestion of collaboration within the Auteurs, and blurbs a remix album by µ-Ziq thus: "Remixes by some kid from Wimbledon for L500. A lot of money for a teenager. Never listened to it myself. Went on to sell well in America. 100% of the publishing goes to me."

Paired with the deliberately subpar stuff on the album, the braggadocio becomes suffocating: What we appear to have on our hands is a spoof of the very notion of quality. I would never recommend a living soul to purchase Das Capital