Deborah Cox - Remixed

By Joshua O'Connell
Posted Friday, August 29, 2003

Deborah Cox has now released three albums. The first two were very successful on Arista, while the third hasn't done quite so well thus far on J. However, most of her hits, large and small, have been remixed and become massive club hits.

To capitalize on what's been a good thing for Cox, J has just released 'Remixed,' a non-stop mix of all of Cox's club hits, which pretty much go from the latest to the oldest. There are a couple of new songs on here, but we'll get to those in a moment.

In terms of the songs that were hits for her in the past, it's a good mix from "Who Do U Love" all the way to her latest hits, "Mr. Lonely" and "Absolutely Not." Unfortunately, a couple of the tracks, most notably "It's Over Now," were not the versions of the songs most known to many radio listeners who were familiar with the song. I assume that in those cases that the versions picked were the club versions that were popular at the time, but they seem inferior in this mix to the radio versions. (To their credit though, the radio version of "It's Over Now" is included as a bonus track at the end of the CD.)

The new tracks are fairly good. "Something Happened on the Way to Heaven" initially struck a nerve because I recognized pieces of the chorus. Looking in the booklet, I was surprised to find it was a Phil Collins song. I had not heard the song in ages, although it came back to me, and Cox's restructuring is definitely pretty creative, and shakes the song up a lot, without losing the melodic interest, while drumming it up into a dance number. Also, "Play Your Part," a track from her latest all-new CD 'The Morning After,' sets up what Mr. Lonely did for the last CD - have another ready dance track for clubs. Both of the new songs (or should I say, remixes) are decent.

One other nitpick, which actually is magnified considering the type of album, is the way the songs were mixed. It's a bit thin. Considering the length of time that each segue lasts (usually a couple of minutes), they're pretty bland fades with the usual random lyric picked out and laid over a slowly mixing set of beats. Magnifying this problem is that mostly radio edits were used, making the mixing slightly more difficult. Still, it's been done well by others, especially the guys over at Robbins Entertainment, so it's a shame that it wasn't better.

Overall though, this definitely is a crowd pleaser, especially for Cox fans. It's another good addition to her musical catalog.

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