The past few years have given us not only a shit ton of remixes, but also of remix compilations. Looking back, remix collections have usually tended to draw on songs from multiple albums, whether we're talking about the Beatles' Love, Madonna's You Can Dance, or Blur's Bustin' + Dronin'. These days, everybody's pulling from the Further Down the Spiral playbook: Bloc Party have released not one, but two remixed versions of individual albums, LCD Soundsystem recently gave us 45:33 Remixes, and Mariah Carey is already said to be working on a remixed version of her latest, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel.
When you compile even the best remixes from one album, rather than an entire career, there's going to be more bloat. It's just inevitable. And bloat of any kind is anathema to a group like Phoenix, whose suave electro-rock is nothing if not streamlined. "I think it was Lord Byron who said at some point that there were too many books for a human being to read," lead singer Thomas Mars told a recent interviewer from Webcuts Music. "You know it's the same now: There are too many remixes! There's no time to hear them, technically in a lifetime."
You could almost say the same thing about new Phoenix remixes alone. The French four-piece's triumphant 2009 album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, has been helping drive HypeMachine traffic for months, in part because the group shared the instrumental "stems" for first single "1901" at the same time they posted the original mp3. (If that wasn't enough, the band has also streamed demos and acoustic tracks from the album.) So Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) was probably inevitable. Its source material is impeccable. Its remixers are Internet-nerd A-list. And a few of the remixes are actually pretty fucking good.
As an album, the digital-only Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) is also kind of frustratingly odd. I doubt even Sofia Coppola will feel the need to listen to the whole thing, straight through, very many times. As for DJs, you can probably guess from the fact that only one of the compilation's 15 tracks exceeds six minutes this isn't one of those remix CDs that makes all the originals more dance-friendly. Nor is it a remixed version of the entire album: The whole thing is built from only eight underlying songs. If you're listening at home, and you want to hear "Fences" five times in a little more than an hour, plus "1901" and "Lisztomania" a couple of times apiece, and you're tired of simply putting Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's first three tracks on repeat, then this is the album for you.
It's hard to stay annoyed with any of that, though, when so many of the individual tracks are so strong. Phoenix albums are typically (gloriously) front-loaded; this one feels back-loaded by comparison. Subtitled "Deakin's Jam", Animal Collective's take on the Tangerine Dream-y space-out of "Love Like a Sunset" deserves to be mentioned alongside both group's best efforts this year, drone-drowned and ecstatic. While the original "Rome" burns with white-hot cigarette-ash guitar distortion, a remix credited to "Neighbours with Devendra Banhart" fiddles (quite nicely) with piano and acoustic guitar, creating a gentle, atmospheric space for the loveless narrator to get his shit sorted out.
Other high-profile remixers' work here is consistently above-average, if rarely on par with the originals a lot of us pretty much know by heart by now. Passion Pit's "1901 Bo Flex'd" tweak goes deeper into John Hughes movies, with hugely romantic synths, but its clickety-clackety arrangement is disappointingly cluttered. Yacht does the farty bass thing with "Armistice", to so-so effect (when Mars sings, "Look what you wasted," it sounds almost accusatory). San Diego ex-Muslims the Soft Pack steal the show with a scuzzy, garage-rocking quasi-cover of "Fences".
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has made Phoenix, deservingly, one of the year's biggest indie-rock success stories. They've appeared on "Saturday Night Live", sold more than 135,000 copies, and landed a spot in a widely viewed Cadillac commercial. If the album has anything to do with the battle between Phoenix's inner Mozart and the group's inner Franz Liszt, though-- referring to the 19th-century musician who gives "Lisztomania" its name-- then Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) has more in common with whichever one suffered a momentary lapse of editing skills. Your move, Mariah.
