I have never owned an album by the Sneaker Pimps. I have heard very good things about their music from various sources and so was pretty excited when I found out I was going to do a review on their latest release. Unfortunately, the buzz was wrong. Admittedly I don't know that much about techno, but good music is good music and "Becoming Remixed" is not good music.
Basically, the Sneaker Pimps pulled six of their old tunes, including "6 Feet Underground," and made ten remixes out of them. Ten you say? Why, that's nearly impossible with only six songs. Wrong. Apparently it's acceptable to make multiple remixes and slap a lot of them on the same CD.
This probably saved the Sneaker Pimps a lot of time when they were trying to decide what to put on their latest album, but thrift doesn't mean quality.
At first, I thought there were actually ten different songs, and they just sounded a lot alike, but this was thanks to the Sneaker Pimps brilliant strategy of spacing their multiple remixes with what little non-duplicated material they have on the CD.
Okay, now let me tell you about the music itself. I expected to get some really thumping dance tracks from a cool band with the word Pimp in its name. Nope, out of luck.
I guess the songs could be described as thumping, but only because there is a solid drum line.
The rest of the music consists of, well, it kind of sounds like pseudo-new age. As psychedelic background music, this stuff rocks the house.
If you're actually listening to it, prepare to snooze. It's all very mellow and calm with lots of soft melody over this throbbing beat.
Since it's techno, there aren't even cool lyrics to spice things up. Probably the best pieces on the album are the two remixes of "6 Underground."
It's a good song and fast enough that you can dance to it. The drum line and the rest of the music mesh well and there is no denying that the Sneaker Pimps know what they're doing with their equipment.
Basically, "Becoming Remixed" is a good album to buy if you want to use it as background music at a party. If you want to dance or listen to something spend your money elsewhere.
The lack of new material and the generally low quality of the songs presented makes "Becoming Remixed" a poor choice of purchase.
On the other hand, the CD only costs $13 and that's not bad for an hour-long CD even if it's pretty much the same thing playing for the entire hour. It's too bad really, Sneaker Pimps is such a great name.
