Rob Zombie – ‘Mondo Sex Head’ Album Review

No Stranger to the land of the remix album (we’ve already been treated to his own ‘American music to strip by’ and White Zombie’s ‘supersexy swinging sounds’) Rob Zombie’s music was always the perfect subject matter for an inspired remix. Like Nine inch nails, Rammstein and Fear Factory, the unyielding industrial chassis to which Rob pins his riffs is the ideal vehicle for retooling and so it proves on the amusingly titled ‘mondo sex head’ which covers the gamut of Zombie’s back catalogue including a couple of choice cuts from the White Zombie years.

That said it does not start promisingly. The ‘Thunderkiss ‘65’ remix kicks off like a random trip into generic club territory and it only redeems itself when the guitars kick in and remove the irritating-beyond-measure sound effects and replace them with that oh-so-familiar pile-driving riff that made the original such a success. Elsewhere the remix does little to augment the original – the vocals are only occasionally interfered with and the Ableton bag of pre-supplied samples are all present and correct throughout a song that barely sets the stereo alight, let alone the dance floor. More imaginative by far is the ‘living dead girl’ remix, which reworks the original into a far-out, unexpectedly trance-styled number, the vocals stripped back to a menacing murmur, and the whole rendered a subtle, interesting companion piece to the original. Contrarily the Document One remix of ‘let it all bleed out’ offers an uninspired take on the tired dubstep of Korn’s recent outing and, as with that painful album, offers nothing that isn’t being done better by dubstep DJs entirely uninterested in rock/metal. Back to heavier, more inventive pastures, and the ‘Foxy Foxy’ remix proves to be a well-crafted, slightly hypnotic beast that roams wide eyed across pastures only hinted at by the original. It’s a highlight that just goes to show that when done well, remixes can offer just as powerful an experience as an original piece of work (the converse being that a dull remix can irretrievably destroy an original track). One song that is surely indestructible is ‘more human than human’ which gets an invigorating reworking that bizarrely ends up sounding like Depeche Mode being violated by Satan himself.  

Such violation does not stop there, ‘Dragula’ equally crossbreeds swampy eighties beats and creeping bass with the result that it sounds as if it belongs in a montage scene from a John Hughes movie about strippers whilst ‘Pussy Liquor’ opts for a creepy sound that belongs in a movie about dead strippers. It’s a decent effort that emphasises the sinister vocals whilst stripping back the original’s fire and fury, rendering it a dark, hypnotic and memorable centrepiece of the record. At seven minutes ‘Lords of Salem’ is one of the longest tracks on offer here, and Das capital have done a fantastic job of tearing apart the song’s original structure and rebuilding it from the ground up, all devastating guitars and slowed-down vocals pounding into your brain. ‘Never gonna stop’, always the most club friendly of tracks, gets a shiny new coat of paint that does it no harm and then ‘superbeast’ appears as a skittering blast of bass-laden paranoia that transports the original into the nightmarish world of Quake and leaves it knee-deep in blood and bone, holding only a nine inch nail gun for comfort. Best remix award goes to Tobias Enhus who, alongside the Jane Cornish string Quartet, comes up with a masterly reworking of ‘Devil’s hole girl’ that utterly eclipses the track from whence it came and spits out a hulking beast that utilises strings to enhance tension and an arsenal of electronic effects to draw out the poisoned soul of the original. ‘Burn’ becomes the aural equivalent of a scrap book, all horror movie samples and bass so distorted that even Ministry would think twice about its inclusion and then the final track (‘Mars needs women’) rounds things out with fuzzy, distorted bass and churning riffs that haven’t moved too far from the original blueprint.

Remix albums have rarely been considered essential listening and this is hardly an exception. Over the course of the record you will experience the very best and the very worst that such albums have to offer and whilst Rob Zombie’s work is far more suited to this sort of treatment than, say, Metallica, it does not have the twisted, holistic ambience of NIN’s ‘further down the spiral’. At its best you will hear tracks such as ‘Devil’s hole girl’ or ‘foxy foxy’, both of which move beyond the original in search of a new and darker soundscape for Rob Zombie to inhabit. These tracks succeed because they are more than just a mash-up of current dance-music trends and a few cast-off riffs and therefore actually offer something new to Rob’s sonic canon. Tracks such as ‘let it all bleed out’, on the other hand, fail miserably because in their desperate attempt to sound relevant and current they and up sounding trite, clichéd and pointless. Fortunately for this record the good very much outweighs the bad, but ultimately this is the sort of thing best given away free with a best of album and certainly as a stand-alone record it is unlikely to be the sort of thing you’d want to put on often.  Overall this is the sort of effort that will delight long-time Rob Zombie fans and pass the rest of the world by, and such a fate is not unjustified. A few tracks raise the game substantially, but overall this is a record that offers little to hold the attention for more than a few cursory spins.