Get Your Body Beat

Chronique

Released on June 6, 2006 -- 'cause that date's all, y'know, evil 'n' stuff -- Get Your Body Beat spins an album's worth of remixes out of one five-minute single. It starts impressively enough: "Get Your Body Beat" is in fact a huge improvement over anything on Combichrist's debut album, Everybody Hates You. Still mining mid-'80s industrial dance music for all his ideas, Anthony LePlegua actually manages to turn his pilfered riffs into a tune with a strong beat and memorable chorus that sounds like a vintage mid-period Cabaret Voltaire single. Terrific, though shamefully derivative, stuff. Following that, however, the six remixes of the same song aren't radical or deconstructive enough to improve on the strengths of the original, and they can safely be ignored. Only the three remaining tracks, a remix of the previous album's "Products," the choppy grind of "What the Fcuk" (unless he's very upset about the trendy English clothing shop French Connection UK, it's puzzling why LePlegua never spells the f-word properly in his song titles) and the appealingly trance-like, sample-filled chill-out "DNA A.M.," keep Get Your Body Beat from being more than a dull, overlong CD single, but the title track and "DNA A.M." alone are worth the price of admission.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo