Chicken Switch is a Melvins remix album by various noise and experimental artists, which was released on September 29, 2009. Unlike usual remix albums where the remixer is given a single track to work with, for Chicken Switch each remixer was given a full album to work with and pull from to create their track (and in some cases, more than one full album was used as source material). The song names were also newly selected by their remixer.
Review:
As outlandish as Melvins records tend to be, Chicken Switch surpasses
expectations. As if remixing the grunge pioneers' baritone vocals and chunky
guitar isn't a bizarre notion to begin with, the chosen contributors weren't
taken from the typical pool of electronic DJs (no Justice or Girl Talk here!).
These are the guitar-slinging, experimental/noise variety of remixers, with
Matmos, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, the Boredoms' Yamatsuka Eye, Acid Mothers
Temple's Kawabata Makota, and noise icon Merzbow doing the cutting and
tweaking. Stranger still is the fact that these artists aren't reworking
particular songs, but instead are each using a full album's worth of material
(or more) to deconstruct and rework into a single track. Usually the material is
warped beyond recognition. It's difficult to tell what album spawned
Merzbow's song, since it's rendered indecipherable by a wall of trebly
distortion and static. Meanwhile, for “Prick Concrète/Revolution M,”
onetime Melvin David Scott Stone elongates a bassy Buzzo a cappella into three
minutes of whale-like throat singing. Lee Ranaldo's “Eggnog Trilogy” is one
of the few tracks that actual feels like a real song with an actual
backbeat – although, like the rest of the album and most of the Melvins' back
catalog, it's disturbingly choppy and at times frightening. Chicken Switch is a
punishing, twisted mess – and in that aspect, it remains true to the warped
Melvins aesthetic, and fans will probably eat it up. Even diehards may find it
hard to decipher the source material, but the wealth of creativity on board is
highly admirable.
All Music Guide – Jason Lymangrover