I don't feel qualified to say anything is the party record of the year, but if I had to call it, I'd throw out the Maroon 5 remix album, Call And Response, as a good candidate. I'm not a huge fan of the band, and the list of remixers is a pretty scattershot collection of hip pop brand names (Swizz Beatz, Pharrell), classic beatmakers (DJ Premier, Ali Shaheed Muhammad), generic mainstream dance douchebags (Tiesto, Paul Oakenfold), indie rock bands (Deerhoof, Of Montreal) and hipster bullshit (Mark Ronson, Cool Kids). But they've always been good for a catchy single, and Adam Levine's falsetto is a strong enough signature that most of those hooks remain pretty much intact regardless of whatever kind of crazy loop gets put under it.

DJ Quik's clunky funk on "Shiver" and ?uestlove's bland "Sunday Morning" aside, everyone puts in about the best effort you could expect from them. The Cool Kids version of "Harder To Breathe" is predictably awful (seriously, why do these guys have a career?) and Oakenfold puts an a cappella over some unt-sss-unt-sss and calls it a day, but that's all you were ever gonna get from them. Meanwhile, Just Blaze turns "Makes Me Wonder" into a brooding power ballad and Bloodshy & Avant squelch the shit out of "Little Of Your Time" (my favorite Maroon 5 deep cut), and Swizz continues his run of awesome obvious-sample-based remixes.

It's hard to imagine who the audience is for this record, besides like, me. Maroon 5 briefly had some cultural capital as the token white rock act namedropped by mainstream rappers (in 2005, when Levine appeared on albums by Kanye, the Ying Yang Twins and Alicia Keys), but that status was pretty short-lived compared to say, Coldplay, and Call And Response is unlikely to endow them with any more hip hop cred than New Old Songs did for Limp Bizkit (although that record had some jams too). But this album at least goes a little beyond being a forgettable holiday season stocking stuffer, and actually puts some pretty good songs in a new context worth hearing, which is all you can really ask for from a remix album anyway.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 4:39 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.