Pitchfork

I don't even know where to begin. My mental state at the moment is dominated by a soggy amalgamation of confusion, frustration, a mild craving for creme-filled caramels, and barely contained rage. I've just heard some of my favorite songs robbed of everything that makes them enjoyable, and reduced to cheap imitations of their once-great selves.

Breaking down such a harrowing experience into stages is not an easy thing to do, but having listened to every painful track on Plastic Mutations a number of times, I think I've picked up on a pattern that plays out cyclically over the course of listening to the record.

Stage 1: Disbelief. "Dear God! This can't be [insert favorite Radiohead track here]! The cheesy synthesizers, the manipulated Macintalk vocals, the dime-a-dozen drum machine beats... this simply cannot be. Oh well, at least it's an 'electronic' tribute, so there probably aren't any vocals."

Stage 2: Fear. "Shit, maybe there are vocals."

Stage 3: Disgust. "No! There are vocals! Is that the guy from Gravity Kills?! He's not even getting the words right! He's off-key!"

Stage 4: Anger. "Fuck."

Stage 5: Acceptance. "This sucks."

At this point, you're probably wondering out of sheer morbid curiosity just what makes Plastic Mutations so terrible. International superstar Mitchell Sigman's take on "Paranoid Android" opens the record with a computerized voice intoning, "I MAY BE PARANOID I MAY BE PARA-PARA-PARA-PARA-PARA-NOID," before Sigman himself comes in with a poor rendition of the song's acoustic guitar-focused opening. And this is the good part.

Sigman has a voice like Trent Reznor's impressionable little cousin, and he's not afraid to use it. And it wouldn't be fair for him to just cover the song verbatim after robbing it its depth; he goes even further, repeating the song's most embarrassing lyric three times, and even screwing up the words: "Kicky squealy Gucci little piggy! Pa-ra-noid Gucci little piggy!" Considering that rabid Radiohead obsessives will no doubt constitute the majority of the people listening to this album, it may work to Sigman's advantage that, for all the general public knows, he could live in a fucking cave.

Another low-point comes with the unrecognizably slaughtered "Everything In Its Right Place," in which multi-platinum dance hall megastars In One Ear and Out the Analog replace the warm, meditative drones of Radiohead's version with synthesizer presets and cut-up computer speech. This is less an album than a crime.

They say that motive is the hardest aspect of a crime to prove. Thus, the one question that simply must be asked about Plastic Mutilations is: why? Both OK Computer and Kid A were albums born of painstaking attention to every sonic detail. Why, with these two albums fresh in our minds, would anybody release a tribute album that so completely misses the point? I don't know, and I don't really care. Whatever logic may be behind it can't alter the fact that Plastic Mutations is an inexcusable piece of shit.

And this is not Radiohead in any sense of the word.