Paul Oakenfold – Greatest Hits & Remixes
Ultra Records (10/23/07)
Dance / Electronic
I’m still perplexed as to who exactly anointed Paul Oakenfold as one of the greatest things to happen to electronic music. Yes, Tranceport was fantastic, and The Roots of Paul Oakenfold was a wonderful collections of old-school breaks, but the direction that his work has taken (including his notorious make-out sessions with 50 Cent) has been so incredibly blah that it’s insulting to the good producers out there to pump this guy up so highly. Yes, as a DJ, he’s proven his worth, but as a producer, well… Even Moby didn’t sell out as badly as Oakenfold… no, wait… that was rash. Let’s just say that even Moby at his most bland isn’t nearly as insipid as the majority of Oakenfold’s production material.
So it makes sense that Oakenfold would turn to his back-catalog for Greatest Hits & Remixes, since it seems that he’s pretty much running on fumes these days. But is it too late for this kind of collection?
The entire thing is mixed, which lends a bit more credence to it as a single composition rather than a whole slew of bits and pieces thrown together. For someone who’s been repeatedly lauded for his remixing abilities, I’d be remiss not to mention that most of them all sound the same. From the Happy Mondays “Step On” remix to the Massive Attack remix to the Dirty Vegas remix to the “Planet Rock” to that damned Mark Ronson “Stop Me” song that I hate, they all have the same chunky drum beat and underlying bass grumble. It’s not bad production, per se, but for someone who’s been canonized as an electronic music god, you’d think that he’d have a few more tricks up his sleeve, that’s all.
That’s not to say that some of the tracks don’t do other things, as the jazzy break-beat remix of Olive’s “You’re Not Alone” is a strong showing, and the remix of Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” is surprisingly good. Aside from the aforementioned Mark Ronson remix, Greatest Hits & Remixes features three other EXCLUSIVE “new Oakenfold 2008” remixes (what are remixes getting post-dated releases like cars, now?). The remix of Oakenfold’s own “Southern Sun” is pretty decent (though at least not sounding too much like the others), with a well-placed breakdown, while the trancy remix of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” feels sort of awkward. The remix of Everything But the Girl’s hit “Missing” isn’t bad but it still takes a seat to Todd Terry’s ten-year-old remix.
As far as the original material stuff goes, the Coke commercial-rific “Starry Eyed Surprise”, featuring that guy from Crazy Town—because I guess that guy from Trik Turner was busy at the time—is more or less a slightly (very slightly) more electronic version of the beat from Eminem’s “Without Me”. Seriously, a mentally retarded person with Parkinson’s could blend the two without much of a problem. More cameo action occurs later on with actress Brittany Murphy lending her decent vocals on “Faster Kill Pussycat” (but she’s no Juliette Lewis, that’s for sure), and it all actually works pretty well together.
Some more original material appears with instrumentals “Dread Rock” and “Ready Steady Go”. The former combines dark trance with rock, but that fusion seems to suffer from a Dutch-trance-esque, 40-second (not-so-well-placed) breakdown during which time I suppose the kids are supposed to raise their glow sticks and sniff their Vapo-Rub, while forgetting about the rock thing. It comes off as a bit lazy from a production standpoint. The latter is an energetic, James Bond-influenced instrumental that served its purpose when was used during a chase sequence in The Bourne Identity. Still, better tracks of a similar nature have been made by artists like Klint and Agent Provocateu; the Difference is that neither of them have been heralded as The Messiah of Electronic Music.
And speaking of Jones Bond themes, David Arnold’s theme from Die Another Day gets a rather uninspired and relatively blasé remix treatment; Moby’s remix was better. When Moby does a better job than you, it’s time to rethink your approach. The remix of Hans Zimmer’s “Jack Theme Suite” from Pirates of the Caribbean is certainly better, and the harder-edged techno track serves as a bit of a throwback to Oakenfold’s Tranceport glory days. This is also apparent in the remix of U2’s “Beautiful Day”, as well as the album’s closer, the remix of Underworld’s “Born Slippy”. It’s a very strong trance anthem, and probably the album’s strongest, while staying true enough to the original that one can still recognize it (unlike the whole lot of those damn Global Underground remixes).
As a collection, nothing on here really sucks; the worst material is just boring but not necessarily repugnant. The good stuff is very good, and he is a good producer when he wants to be, but sadly it seems that, as evidenced by most of the material on this album, he’s realized that he can still be rich by using the same formula over and over again. Or maybe it’s that he’s truly not cut out for production work. His strongest work is clearly still his trance mixes. But he got greedy. He wanted to take over the world. Oops. And again, the collection being mixed does add some sense of semblance to it, but for the most part it’s not a very favorable trip down memory lane. Instead, go buy Tranceport or one of the older Perfecto mixes and find out why there used to be a time when everyone (including this very writer) thought this guy was awesome.
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