Rating: 5/10
After a decade of fighting, a medieval knight returns home more battered and sceptical than ever. There’s misery all over, and there’s also the plague, so he blamelessly concludes that there is no God. But our hero is then visited by Death, who wants to take him from the world of the living. He doesn’t concede, however, and challenges Death to a game of chess. This is how Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal begins, casting a revelatory light on cinema. Coupling great minds with flourishing ideas is the best recipe for the advancement of art.
The idea of reworking jazz classics with a beat-infused cover is a tricky decision. In the tradition of the two previous Verve Remixed releases, this third volume feels like we are trapped in a noisy room and a jazz record is heard through the wall of an adjoining apartment. Some of these remixes inevitably sink like a stone and fail to pay an honourable tribute to the classics, instead sounding like distant thunder in your head: you try to separate the new from the old parts of the songs and you often end up starving for the original versions.
Take the Brazilian Girls’ remixing of Blossom Dearie’s “Just One of Those Things”, for instance. You enter a drawn-out wind tunnel that sucks you in and sets a dirty, beat-soaked trail, like crumbs on the floor for you to go after; there is no clue where the mould was left. The only true exceptions are Bent’s reinterpretation of “Speak Low” and “Sing, Sing, Sing,” as addressed by RSL. The former is a beautiful, chilled-out version of Billie Holiday’s track where the British duo refuses to shift an inch off the course they pursued in Programmed to Love, most notably on tracks like the neat “Swollen”. They thus take the original even further in emotional depth. RSL’s take on Anita O’Day benefits from the loads of swing that the original already possesses.
Add to this “The Gentle Rain”, which RJD2 redefines with his lowercase hip hop-scented blips and his reductionist formulae, while Astrud Gilberto’s voice stays crystal clear. And, unlike Postal Service’s reviewing of “Little Girl Blue” which is a real flop, when Nina Simone resurfaces by means of The Album Leaf’s remix of “Lilac Wine”, real magic occurs. That may be due solely to Simone’s ethereal voice – as it goes well with any sound collage - but the resulting track nears perfection. Well, Jeff Buckley did it better, but this one is a fair shot. Overall, only a third of Verve Remixed, Vol. 3 is worth hearing. Just go back to your vinyls for the classics and you won’t regret it.
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