Now there's no real bad beats on here many of them, particularly the aforementioned "Borrowed Time" and the jazz fusion of "Strange Ways" revamp "Cant Reform 'Em", are worth copping in their own right no matter how much they tweak your memories, and a number of these tracks would've worked well if they were released on the flipside of a circa-2004 12" as bonus remixes. (It also can't be a good sign that "Monkey Suite", which initially showed up on the first Chrome Children comp as a teaser for what would've been the real Madvillainy 2, winds up here instead as if it had nowhere else to go in the future.) And what's a DangerDoom track doing in here? Jeez. Instead what we get are a jumble of Redd Foxx one-liners and hippie comedy bits that sound like they stumbled into the wrong record on the way to a Quasimoto album.
#Madvillainy album 320 movie
To make matters more bewildering, every little interstitial chunk of characteristic weirdness from the original album- the 1960s UHF talk show intro to "Figaro", the harrowing snippet of Steve Reich's "Come Out" from "America's Most Blunted", the historical movie villain narrative bookends- is replaced with some other hijinx that largely lack the comic-book drama and yellow newsprint tone of the original. And while the beats are up to Madlib's usual high standards, they're not quite as stylistically unified going from the crackling sixties soul decay of "Fire in the Hole" to the upfront, fat-dude-walk horns of "Heat Niner" to "Monkey Suite"'s clean, Hi Records groove makes for good variety but fails to set a consistent mood.
Part of the appeal of the original "Rainbows" was hearing Doom flatly, coolly harmonize with the woozy melody in Madlib's beat, and with that melody gone he sounds untethered and adrift in the straightforward boom-bap of "Drainos". There are a couple identifiable letdowns, though: The lighthearted "Curls" has been mutated into the claustrophobic "Pearls" and, like a lot of the tracks, it takes forever for Doom's verse to actually start, the natural side effect of tacking on another minute's worth of music to 90 or so seconds' worth of lyrics. Its transformation into bass-rattling, Dilla-esque minimalism with a ghostly choir backdrop results in maybe the single best beat on the whole album, but with the tone altered so drastically it's hard to call it either an improvement or a letdown compared to the original.
"Accordion", for instance- well, there's no accordion anymore, and it's been renamed "Borrowed Time". And no matter how hot the beats get on Madvillainy 2: the Madlib Remix, it's hard to sit back and let everything click into place, not when you've had more than four years to let the original etch itself into your brain. That's a risky idea: It's a thankless task to create a completely remixed version of an album that was already borderline-perfect.
Apparently Madlib got so impatient sitting around waiting for Doom to record some new verses for a followup to their classic 2004 collaboration that he just up and grafted a bunch of new beats to Doom's old verses. And where's the Madvillainy sequel? Because this ain't it.
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