Maroon 5 - Call And Response: The Remix Album Review

How many fans of Maroon 5's polished funk-pop are also into Deerhoof's extraterrestrial indie rock, DJ Premier's boom-bap rap, or Tiësto's monolithic Euro-trance, much less all three? The L.A. quintet makes it work on Call and Response: The Remix Album, letting those unusual suspects — along with hitmakers like Mark Ronson and Pharrell Williams — play with their master tapes. The resulting hit-to-miss ratio is surprisingly high: Few bands make music that's elastic enough to be stretched into so many improbable shapes without losing any snap. B+...full text Remix albums rightfully have a bad rep. Too often they're merely contract satisfiers—easy ways to give big artists something fresh on the shelves or to separate dedicated fans from more of their dough. But "Call and Response" is everything the format could and should be. The band enlisted names big and small to get deep into its two-album catalog, and judging from the thoughtfulness of the contributions, they're all pre-existing Maroon fans. Swizz Beatz uses an uncharacteristically loose and light hand on "If I Never See Your Face Again"; Mark Ronson gets Mary J. Blige to contribute a great vocal to his funky take on "Wake Up Call"; and Pharrell Williams' "She Will Be Loved" is lo-fi and completely devoid of schmaltz or radio trickery. No one was trying to make new hits here or take their stock remix loop and carelessly plop it over an unrelated melody—they seem to just really love the songs. —Kerri Mason...full text Maroon 5, art rockers? These remixes of the group's hits by indie acts like Of Montreal and Deerhoof make the idea seem oddly plausible. Maroon 5's bubblegummy pop — and Adam Levine's anodyne vocals — make the band ideal candidates for remix treatment, and they've corralled some impressive extreme makeovers: hip-pop (Swizz Beatz), Euro-dance (Bloodshy & Avant), crunk (David Banner), retro R&B (Mark Ronson). The best are counterintuitive: Deerhoof's blip-heavy take on "Goodnight Goodnight" might just convince Levine to quit Hollywood life for artsy bohemia....full text