This year’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has 36 snappy, well-formed, and eminently danceable minutes of electronic guitar pop, every minute and sound distinctly and, most importantly, cohesively Phoenix. No way, then, that a fourteen-artist, fifteen-track, 68-minute Frankenstein’s monster of a compilation of alternate versions can compare, right? Too many cooks in the kitchen, the cooks are less talented, the very triumph of conciseness and sleekness in the band’s pop reversed and bloated, and so on. Let’s take a hard-boiled look.

“Listzomania.” I was almost expecting not to hear one song from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) of equal quality to the original, but that fear was dispelled about thirty seconds into the first track. As the Alex Metric remix thumps in forebodingly then loosens, an already fun song is made more so with snippets of trance cheese, electroclash bass lines, and skeletal vocal glitches. Later, 25 Hours a Day scores with a rhythmic piano line before their rework flat-lines into a sloppy throb.