The Crystal Method: Community Service : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

While DJ mix CDs are intended to simulate the club experience -- whimsical, spontaneous, everything but the $20 drinks -- even the best mixes become predictable with repeated listening. A few rare cuts or choice remixes can give mix CDs shelf-life, and the Crystal Method's Community Service has plenty: Six of the disc's sixteen tracks are either other artists' mixes of Crystal Method originals, or TCM's own remixes of rock acts like P.O.D. and Garbage (they even salvage Rage Against the Machine's previously unbearable "Renegades of Funk"). That kind of star power helps, but Community Service's real appeal is as a seventy-six-minute tutorial in crescendo. It morphs seamlessly from benign grooves to kinetic rock into an all-out dance party, ending just as it peaks. Any competent DJ can synch beats; the rarer skill is in setting the mood. For the Crystal Method, it's child's play.

MIKE MAGNUSON
(July 23, 2002)