Review Summary: Not even a must have for die hard Skillet fans.
I was honestly excited when I was buying this EP. I was hoping that the remixes of the 4 songs off Skillet's popular "Awake" would be similar to songs off Skillet's album "Alien Youth." If the songs were up tempo rockers with sick beats and electronic effects, this would be worth the $4 it cost. But then, I realized that every song was at least a minute longer than it's original version. My first thought was that they might have thrown in some cool electronic breakdowns, but I was just grasping at straws. They just slowed down the songs. Alot.
And that's basically the problem with the whole album. It's way too slow and has almost no energy. Every song has almost the same beat and piano line; it just gets boring and monotonous. And if that wasn't bad enough, they chose to focus on the beats that make the songs almost unrecognizable instead of the singing. John Coopers and Jen Ledgers vocals are just used as background noise. But, besides having them be background noise and adding occasional echoes, nothing has been done with the vocals. They sound exactly the same as on the original "Awake."
There are a couple of exceptions, however. The band decided to experiment with two of the songs "Monster (Unleash the Beast)" and "Don't Wake Me (Pull Remix)." Unfortunately, the experimenting only worked in one of these two songs. In the "Monster" remix they decided to add Jen's vocals to the mix. This, however, does not add much of a difference to the song since it seems like they only use every other word of the song and their voices are barely noticeable. Also, some of Jen's lines weren't even in the original song. It sounds like she's saying "I'm gonna shock you/It's gonna hurt you" but the word "shock" could also be interchangeable with "shoot" since I can't really tell what she's actually saying. However, the remix of "Don't Wake Me" is actually interesting. They slow down what was probably the slowest song on the original album, and it works. They add some electric guitar and violin to the song and the John Cooper's voice is used as the forefront of the song instead of just background. This was the only song on the album I thought was worth keeping out of the 4 song EP and, in my opinion, it's better than the original song.
So out of the 4 song remix EP, one song works, one song tries but fails, and the other two or just plain boring. What seems like an interesting and promising idea for the band ends up falling flat on its face.
