#414 Radiohead - TKOL RMX 1234567

Radiohead, cmon. Even though I'm not so hot on remixes as a concept, here I make an exception.

I suppose this was the only way to finish the Radiohead journey - the band has increasingly shown interest in sounding like various newest waves of electronic fiddlers and experimenters, why not just have all those people remix Radiohead songs. And while we're at it, why don't we make sure those people really put their respective signature sounds on these songs, and really thoroughly embrace the post-IDM Radiohead sound.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The album plays out as all 7 singles played in order, and jumps between tracks, but the back-to-back pairing of Harmonic 313 and Mark Pritchard's remixes of Bloom is the most illustrative sequence. The former is what's wrong with this album, just sludgy, aimless noisemaking, dipping the song in tar and throwing it against the wall, with a minute-long ambient outro slapped on seemingly as a last-ditch effort to put some movement on the track. The latter, meanwhile, throws buzzy loping bass over swarming synth lines, building profitably on the tension of the original version (though it too suffers from an overlong endgame). Unfortunately, most of the songs fall into the Harmonic 313 category: lazy, gimmicky, a Yorke vocal line away from Aphex Twin's infamous whole-cloth non-remixes.

There's a few ways to evaluate a remix:
1) Does it inspire the remixer to do something outside of what they would normally do?
2) Does it improve on the original track in some way?
2a) Failing that, does it at least make you see the original track in a new light?

Let's go from no to yes. The biggest problem with this album is that it just sounds like a lot of the current crop of electronic music, with Thom Yorke singing on it, as much a Radiohead song as Rabbit in Your Headlights. I'm only familiar with a handful of these remixers' original works, but for the most part, these sound like (feat. Thom Yorke) tracks.

They do diverge from the originals, there's no denying that, and while they're often not straight improvements, the rub is in the 2a of it all, I do feel like I came away with a new perspective on OG TKOL. The album's play with repetition is pulled in all manner of new directions here, with single threads stretched and spun into endless quilts of sound. And if nothing else, I appreciate the meticulous craftsmanship that went into the original, since only a few of these have any real claim to being improvements on the originals. It's a perfectly enjoyable, spacy listen in its own right, if a bit overlong. With 2.375 remixes per source track, there's a lot of repetition, which is the collection's greatest strength and weakness 3/5

You might like this if: You like the modern indie/experiemental electronic music scene. Or you really like The King of Limbs.