4 out of 5

Label: Ectopic Ents

Produced by: Fred Kevorkian (mastered by)

While I often question the “purpose” of remix albums – that if you’re not going to produce something that feels distinct from the source material, I’m likely not the audience – I can’t fault a remixer for leveraging the original material for all the good bits of their new take. I mean, that’s arguably the job, but also, if you’re able to bring new focus to those good bits, maybe I can flex my definition of “distinct” to match.

So: when listening to the remixes of Foetus’ Love (or most of Love, plus two tracks from the (not adam) EP), I kept noting that the bits I really loved were shared with the album – the heavy surge of Aladdin in Reverse; the vocal additions of Jennifer Charles; the way songs can swing between orchestral Foetus and industrial Foetus – and thus questioned if I should just be listening to that album. But there’s firstly some more obvious changeups here, with a sequencing change, and the bookend tracks converted into ambient / noise, and then also staring me in the (ears?) was how smoothly these remixers had brought in their styles while maintaining the full Thirlwell assault, and the spirit of the songs.

Tweaker fleshes out the NiN connection; Matmos highlights the pop; Mike Patton streamlines the weirdness… I’m hearing Foetus having influenced these acts who are now layering their influence back onto Foetus. Pretty wild.

The aforementioned bookends are maybe a little weird in this regard in comparison, as most of the album is more direct. So some of my normal criticism indirectly applies: it would’ve maybe been interesting (and have helped the sequencing) to hear more experiments like that more often, but Vein is still an incredibly successful remix album, helping me redefine how one can work within the borders of a song and still re-present it uniquely.