:wumpscut: – Born Again

The thing about full length remix albums is that they are often miss and rarely hit. While I wouldn't say that this release is a filler compilation, I felt that it didn't have anything overly spectacular going for it.
There's nothing exceedingly crap about it either, it's just that I thought the best parts were at most temporary. It starts off strongly (Is It You - "Scintillating Mixx" is a very nicely structured adaptation of an existing emotive and mellower track) but by the time I reached the half point I found I had drifted off. Weirdly enough, it's hard to attribute this to something specific. While I hate making comparisons, and I try to evaluate things on their merit, I do think the let down with this this is due to the lack of distinct variety that Rudy is normally known for. The remixes on this also tend to be mellower, especially with some of the heavier tracks like War and Embryodead. The result is that this is a somewhat more bleepier and - dare I say - at times even electro minimalist (in the not quite so good way). I suppose I'm trying to say that all the tinkering means that the raw emotion, the grief, the rage and despair has been (literally) processed a little too much - the effect is that some of the depth has evaporated.
Don't get me wrong though, this is still a solid release, though I thought it would have been far more appropriate as an accompanying bonus disc. It features some cool tracks: Embryodead - "Cockroach Modified" is an 85/170ish bpm breakbeat interpretation and Golgotha - "Roughly Distorted Version" starts off with the lyrics as massively distorted evil growling and then speeds up to become a crunchy rhythmic noise number. There are also very nice and ambient synth lines here and there.
Ultimately, this is an ok release, nothing spectacular and nothing too shocking. As mentioned previously, it suffers from the spectre of "it could have been better" because it's Rudy of :Wumpscut: