Man, do I wish I liked this. After the smash success of Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa was prevented from touring due to COVID and so she decided to instead collaborate with DJ & producer The Blessed Madonna to create a remix album. And the talent assembled here is pretty stellar. Madonna (OG, not The Blessed) herself and Missy Elliott stop by to lend their vocal talents. Mark Ronson handles a remix and gets Gwen Stefani in on guest vocals. K-Pop group Blackpink shows up on one track. But something in the mix is just way off and I feel like you can tell it right from the cover. Of course, you’re not going to get Lipa, Madonna, Missy, Gwen and Ronson all in one place to take a cover photo; of course, you’re going to do some kind of a Photoshop job. But surely it didn’t have to look this ******* terrible, did it? How much money did they really spend assembling all the talent on the seventeen tracks on this album and this is the dog**** they put on the cover? Just wow.
That aesthetic of the jumbled collage unfortunately pervades the entire album. The songs from the original album (and a couple of others like Love is Religion & Kiss and Make Up) are buried under an avalanche of kitschy sound effects, electronic vocal effects, chaotic beats and weird, awkward samples. Nothing works. Boys Will Be Boys is a perfect example. On the original album, it was a masterstroke, a strange and unexpected swerve that closed the album on a serious, striking note. Here, it comes in the middle of the album and has, for God knows what reason, a Latin-flavored feel, a kind of Rio Carnival beat, complete with piercing whistles, honking horns and a rattling cowbell. I’m not here to say that pairing up-tempo music with sad lyrics is a bad idea in general; occasionally it works. But it just doesn’t here and it’s so strange to hear these lyrics dissecting toxic masculinity and lamenting the pervasiveness of sexual assault backed by an aggressive cowbell and the sound of a block party. It’s downright tone-deaf. Nothing else on the album rises to this level of offensiveness, but both Boys Will Be Boys and the entire album kind of raise the same question: Why?
And ultimately I guess that’s the death knell of this album. Yes, I’m biased toward the original album; I do think it’s essentially a perfect record. But here’s the truth about this remix album. None of these remixes surpass the original versions. None of them are even remotely as good. None of them are even really interesting except in the way they occasionally just puzzled me. Bottom line: I can’t imagine ever listening to any of these versions again while the original versions exist. That pretty well says it all. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – jumbled, messy remix album has no clear vision and can’t even come close to equaling the original versions of these songs; forgettable at best, bad at worst. 1 ½ stars.