Tourist’s marginally upbeat take on “Change (In The House Of Flies)” is a radical departure that tosses out the verse/chorus/verse structure. It’s when the original is scrambled that things change, however.

On these the observations and impressions are adjusted only slightly, like a dimmer switch. Some remixes simply replace the music and more or less leave intact Moreno’s vocals and lyrics, as on Mike Shinoda’s Linkin Park-adjacent work on “Passenger” which maintains the loss-of-control theme or Robert Smith’s UFO synth-drenched “Teenager” remix that preserves the high school heartache. How much of a song’s feeling or meaning shifts can depend on how much of a departure the remix is from the original. Here, the listener can feel the victim’s claustrophobia of being locked in a car’s trunk and suffer right alongside. He turns the track into a nightmare-ish bubble bath, making the one line left in from the original (the kidnapper’s “Soon I’ll let you go”) so much creepier when surrounded by the dopesick soundscape. Clams Casino’s brilliantly disorienting witch house remix, however, removes the ambiguity and makes it clear: this is an unpleasant experience. But because of Moreno’s lyrical vagueness and aching delivery, as well as the redline-engine riffing, there might be sex involved and the victim might be enjoying it.

Thus, opener “Feiticeira” finds him imagining a first-person account of a kidnapping from the perspectives of both the kidnapper and the victim. Moreno’s lyrics tend to express feelings and abstractions rather than concrete ideas, which can, perhaps purposefully, obfuscate a song’s intent or purpose. And when Megan James shows up to duet with Moreno, it’s as if they’re flirting with danger and definitely OK with it. So when Moreno sings, “I could float here forever / Anemic and sweet,” it goes from adrenaline-fueled paranoia of the original to relaxed euphoria inside of Purity Ring’s exquisitely gleaming remix. “Knife Prty,” for example, finds vocalist Chino Moreno stretching the details of an apparently real party that mixes sex and violence and, in effect, makes the song’s title literal. At times it happens within just a couple lyrics. The major themes of the latter-sex, drugs, and alienation-take on new or modified meanings on the former.

The most accurate way to look at Black Stallion is to see it as a recontextualization of White Pony.

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