Rob Zombie: American Made Music To Strip By

Zombie's dead on arrival

Rob Zombie is good for America. The man lives his life like a cross between Night of the Living Dead and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, purveys a premium blend of death-disco beats and Sabbath-on-steroids guitars, and releases albums with liner notes full of pentagrams, women in fur bikinis, and demons who say things like "Get down, muthafucka!" In short, he kicks major ass.

More's the pity, then, that American Made Music To Strip By leaves one's derriere entirely footprint-free. Rare indeed is a remix album this redundant.

A good industro-metal remix can do one of two things: increase the headbanging and/or bootyshaking quotient of the original, or alter it beyond recognition in favor of creepy aggro-ambience. Alas, these interpretations of tunes from Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe do neither. The remixers Zombie enlists—God Lives Underwater, Rammstein, Limp Bizkit's DJ Lethal, Nine Inch Nails' Charlie Clouser—are themselves so sonically similar to the AstroCreep that they might as well not have bothered. Even Pragha Khan and Oliver Adams, of the inimitable Lords of Acid, fall flat with a perfunctory rehash of "Superbeast." Clouser, Khan, and Adams have all created killer Zombie remixes in the past; their by-the-numbers work here is inexcusable.

To be fair, some of these dead still live: Phillip Steir uses a simple off-kilter guitar flourish to transform "The Ballad of Resurrection Joe" into an eerie, unsettling bit of strip-hop, while Chris Vrenna's rave-y "Return of the Phantom Stranger" makes one wonder what Zombie's originals might have become in the hands of, say, Underworld. However, these tracks alone do not a worthwhile album make.

Blame the source material for its lack of depth (c'mon, there's only so much that one can do with "Demonoid Phe-nomenon"). Blame the remixers for sleepwalking at the boards. Blame Rob for putting out this turkey. Whatever you do, don't get suckered in by the title or the cover's pneumatic cowgirl—the only thing this American Made Music will strip you of is your money. Use it wisely, and buy the director's cut of Dawn of the Dead, man. (Geffen)

—Sean Collins

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