Various Artists
Plastic Mutations: The Electronic Tribute to Radiohead
[Vitamin]
Rating: 1.0
I don't even know where to begin. My mental state at the moment is dominated
by a soggy amalgamation of confusion, frustration, a mild craving for
creme-filled caramels, and barely contained rage. I've just heard some of my
favorite songs robbed of everything that makes them enjoyable, and reduced to
cheap imitations of their once-great selves.
Breaking down such a harrowing experience into stages is not an easy thing to
do, but having listened to every painful track on Plastic Mutations
a number of times, I think I've picked up on a pattern that plays out
cyclically over the course of listening to the record.
Stage 1: Disbelief. "Dear God! This can't be [insert favorite Radiohead track
here]! The cheesy synthesizers, the manipulated Macintalk vocals, the
dime-a-dozen drum machine beats... this simply cannot be. Oh well, at least
it's an 'electronic' tribute, so there probably aren't any vocals."
Stage 2: Fear. "Shit, maybe there are vocals."
Stage 3: Disgust. "No! There are vocals! Is that the guy from
Gravity Kills?! He's not even getting the words right! He's off-key!"
Stage 4: Anger. "Fuck."
Stage 5: Acceptance. "This sucks."
At this point, you're probably wondering out of sheer morbid curiosity just
what makes Plastic Mutations so terrible. International superstar
Mitchell Sigman's take on "Paranoid Android" opens the record with a
computerized voice intoning, "I MAY BE PARANOID I MAY BE PARA-PARA-PARA-PARA-PARA-NOID,"
before Sigman himself comes in with a poor rendition of the song's acoustic
guitar-focused opening. And this is the good part.
Sigman has a voice like Trent Reznor's impressionable little cousin, and he's
not afraid to use it. And it wouldn't be fair for him to just cover the song
verbatim after robbing it its depth; he goes even further, repeating the
song's most embarrassing lyric three times, and even screwing up the words:
"Kicky squealy Gucci little piggy! Pa-ra-noid Gucci little piggy!"
Considering that rabid Radiohead obsessives will no doubt constitute the
majority of the people listening to this album, it may work to Sigman's
advantage that, for all the general public knows, he could live in a fucking
cave.
Another low-point comes with the unrecognizably slaughtered "Everything In Its
Right Place," in which multi-platinum dance hall megastars In One Ear and
Out the Analog replace the warm, meditative drones of Radiohead's version
with synthesizer presets and cut-up computer speech. This is less an album
than a crime.
They say that motive is the hardest aspect of a crime to prove. Thus, the one
question that simply must be asked about Plastic Mutilations is: why?
Both OK Computer and Kid A were albums born of painstaking
attention to every sonic detail. Why, with these two albums fresh in our
minds, would anybody release a tribute album that so completely misses the
point? I don't know, and I don't really care. Whatever logic may be behind
it can't alter the fact that Plastic Mutations is an inexcusable piece
of shit.
And this is not Radiohead in any sense of the word.
-Matt LeMay