AMG Review of Hot for Remixes: A Tribute to Van Halen

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

Cleopatra's Hot for Remixes: A Tribute to Van Halen is a typical Cleopatra release in that it subverts expectations and winds up appealing to a very specialized audience -- an audience so specialized, it's hard to tell whether it exists. The producers had '80s and '90s hard rock and pop-metal veterans -- Pretty Boy Floyd, Stephen Pearcy, Kevin Dubrow, Gilby Clarke, L.A. Guns, and Bango Tango -- cover such Van Halen classics as "Ain't Talking About Love," "Running with the Devil," and "Panama," then they gave the recordings to industrial metal terrorists like Pigface, Pig, KMFDM, Sheep on Drugs, and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, who remade them in their image. Theoretically, this may be interesting, since it's such a perverse practice, but in play, Hot for Remixes is at times unlistenable because of this perversity, which results in weird juxtapositions and mixes that are bewildering, not intriguing. And it's not especially adventurous, either, which means Hot for Remixes is just for listeners with a taste for the perverse, yet with the patience for a record that doesn't deliver.