The King & Eye: RMX (2003)

Here's something different, nay unique in the big wide world of Residential recordings. The band have handed over all tapes/MIDI files to a third party, German producer Paralyzer, and said 'bring this into the 21st century'. His approach is an interesting one. With a lot of dance remixes the original material is often reduced to a few samples echoing behind all the new stuff the producer has added. Here the instrumentation may have been radically changed and the sounds are not those we are used to hearing on Rez records, but many of the melodies have been left intact and the vocals are very much to the forefront. I guess the question is do I like what these dance orientated styles have done for the King and Eye tracks, does it work? My honest answer would be that some of them work and some of them don't.

I really like the new 'Viva Las Vegas' and when I saw that video clip up on the Blog I thought "my god, a new single!", but nothing more has been heard about that one (shame). I do feel there's a little too much 'what style shall I apply to this one? drum and bass? Rammstein?' ('Devil in Disguise') and that some of these styles, like the frantic techno applied to 'All Shook Up', sound a little dated. On the positive side it often works well and we get a couple of tracks that were never on the original King and Eye album to begin with; 'Don't' ('Don't Be Cruel' b-side) and 'Can't Help Falling in Love'. I don't think we've heard this one before in any shape or form, tasty! Makes me wonder if there's any more Elvis tracks in the vaults.. Paralyzer has done a nice job with 'Burning Love', one of my favourite Elvis tracks. Floating breaks, gorgeous melodies, it's the nicest track The Residents never made, and maybe this is the problem. In it's own terms it is a nice downbeat record weirded out by the inclusion of odd vocals, in Residential terms a great vocal performance but what poncey music! Did I say 'problem' just then? Perhaps that's going too far.

I think there was more of an outcry regarding The Residents going 'DJ' or 'dance' when WB:RMX appeared (which I found strange because I thought it was incredibly 'them'), while the fan reaction to this album, as far as I can tell, has been indifference. I don't think people think this is a bad album but they may well feel it's not a 'proper' Residents album and that's why they haven't moaned about it.