Good Morning Mr. Phelps, your mission this time is not to swim to eight Gold medals, or infiltrate an espionage network, but is to assemble a band of electronic remixers who adore David Bowie, hold him in high esteem, and assign them to re-invent whatever song they want to in their own respectful style – or not. Therefore, we end up here in the paranormal and talking about Life Beyond Mars: Bowie Covered.
Starting with an observation, I have never heard of most of these remixers; couldn’t they have chosen some more famous DJs to try this concept out on? Life Beyond Mars is a play on Bowie’s Life ON Mars and becomes a collection of reworked David Bowie songs where they shied away from his monster hits like “China Girl”, “Let’s Dance”, and “Fame”. How could they be allowed to do that and still fulfill the mission?? LBM is another experiment in Bowie Sci-Fidom, which is kind of like playing with dynamite because Bowie, or as I learned during my research on this project, “The Thin White Duke” is as Flash is to Gordon or Star versus Trek.
The best cut is track one from Au Revoir Simone (good song placement) which sounds familiar and comes on like an Outer Limits theme, though her voice soon soothes chills from the dark side on “Oh you Pretty Things” (purchase/download) ;Bowie must have flipped it at a faster pace. I also recognized and dug Sumumu Yokota’s take on “Golden Years” (purchase/download) (wow one of his classic hits!) which held most true and gave enough respect to the original. The rest earn some dishonorable mentions that go to Polar, Heartbreak, Ziggy Stardust (I’ve actually heard of HIM), Emperor Machine (nice jam on track nine, “Repitition” (purchase/download); Joakim, Carl Craig, whose take on “Looking For Water” really cooks in-general, Matthew Dear and of all the nerve, The Thing who strayed so far from the original title track on the album’s finale that he never got it started. It is the most spaced-out cut of all – just totally weird and would be best included on your next sound effects production anthology.
These are all probably too polite and respectful covers as the assemblage of producers takes few real risks, me thinks. Maybe these Electro remixers were not the correct choice, or there should have been others like a Jellybean or a David Mancuso included in this experiment (or me!) in order to have had a more creatively lovely and inclusively bright result.
One good exercise here is that this album tests your David Bowie song knowledge, however painfully at times. I wonder what DB himself thinks of this randomness upon the anniversary of his sixth decade on Earth, and I even delayed this write-up in order to try and contact him for his impressions. If you are reading this, please feel free to contact us, David and we will reach back and include your update! In the meantime, two-point-five robotic red planet stars.
Released June 23, 2008 on Rapster Records
