Really now, what the last remix album that was worth anyone's time? Bjork's Telegram, perhaps. Maybe (and this is a big maybe) Tortoise Remixed. But the majority of remix albums that immediately come to mind-- the Sea and Cake's Two Gentlemen, owL remix Low, the High Llamas' Lollo Rosso, Mogwai's Kicking a Dead Pig, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's Experimental Remixes-- have only one or two tracks worthy of even hardcore fans. I know it's dumb to complain, since the remix industry has always been less about interesting reinterpretations of songs and more about giving sonic handjobs to each other ("Sonic the Handjob"-- now there' a Playstation title I wouldn't mind playing), but that doesn't mean I still can't be harsh on CM for simply being representative of the genre.

Look. Cornelius is a fucking genius, I think we can all agree on that. But he succumbs to a bad case of Remixer's Syndrome on CM, wherein everything he remixes ends up sounding just like him. Thus, CM sounds like Fantasma with the original songs reduced to mere samples. Or, conversely, Cornelius reuses scads of samples and production techniques from Fantasma in the CM remixes, to the point where it might be redundant to own both albums. Either way, it's the same thing.

To be fair, there are indeed some interesting moments on CM. Cornelius takes Money Mark's rather lead- footed pop song "Maybe I'm Dead" and makes it feather- light, the vocals floating about in a dreamy lounge arrangement. And UNKLE's "Ape Shall Never Kill Ape" melds punk rock rhythms with cartoony orchestral swoops so seamlessly you wonder why no one thought of it before. But overall, Cornelius sounds like he isn't trying too hard. Maybe it's that his sounds are so recognizably him that it sounds rote, or that the choice of artists he chose to remix seems pretty obvious, with the exception of the Pastels, whose "Windy Hill" is ironically the most enjoyable track on CM. (On the other hand, this version is also available on the Pastels' infinitely more enjoyable Illuminati rexix LP.) In that respect, CM is a grand missed opportunity; just think of what it would have been like had Cornelius tried to remix, say, his Matador labelmates. Cornelius remixing Cat Power? Yo La Tengo? Chavez? Pavement, even? Now there's a remix album worth investigating.

-Nick Mirov