2 out of 5

Label: Metropolis

Producer: Rudy Ratzinger

So I’m yet to be sold on a remix album.  Except in the case of something like Aphex’s 26 Mixes, where the tracks are rendered so distinct from their original influence or beat that they are wholly separate entities, I’m not a club person, so I have a hard time understanding the desire or need to ‘remix’ something unless it actually adds another non-superficial dimension to the song.  The seemingly required remixes of rock tracks that (used to?) appear on CD singles can be amusing for how strange it is to hear a punk band swiveled into thumpa-thumps, but this is also a world of Sting and Modest Mouse samples being used in hip-hop hits, so anything goes, me suppose.

Anyhow, Born Again doesn’t change my tune.  While some of these tracks drop some interesting concepts into things, on the whole, by distilling Ratzinger’s initial tunes (mostly from ‘Embryodead’) down to their basic templates of vocals and a beat, it’s stripping the songs of a lot of the production and layering that makes me like the songs so much in the first place.  When some of this stuff is angered up with fuzz and hefty, dirty beats, it covers up the industrial cheesiness of it.  Turning it back into a straight dance tune (’cause most of these songs did already have that rhythm in place) is just drawing back the curtain.  The moments where my ears do perk up are those that don’t touch the original all that much or, what catches me as one of the best tracks on here because of how distinctly aggressive it is in comparison to the rest – Wumpsex – it turns out to be an unreleased tune.  The latter half of the album is better than the first to me, actually stretching for some original directions into which to take the source material (the IDM style percussion on the Embryodead mix, for example), and I will admit that nothing here is flat-out lazy by any means, I’m just not sure why you’d want to dance to any of these remixes over the more emotive and flowing originals.