
As much as I loved "I'm Not Alone," the first single from Calvin Harris' new album Ready for the Weekend, I knew there was trouble on the horizon when I read an interview with him talking about how, at 25, he was starting to feel old, wondering about the merits of club life. Oh God. The man who sang, "I like all the girls" is getting philosophical and world-weary. Most young turks manage to get a couple of albums to market before they consider themselves codgers.
But maybe there is a finite amount of energy in each of us and Harris front loaded most of his. His fantastic debut album I Created Disco was the kind of pure deadpan chutzpah only the British can get away with. Each song contained such audacious and catchy ideas, the execution hardly mattered. "I've got my car and my ride and my wheels, when I go to Vegas," he sang, glorying in the stoned redundancy. The songs on I Created Disco may not merit a place in the immortal canon of pop music, but they grabbed you immediately, gave you a laugh on the dancefloor and stayed with you for weeks, at least. Call it vapid, the album knew it was vapid and let you in on the joke.
The songs on Ready for the Weekend aren't so starved for attention. The world, it seems, is a more serious place and Harris has had to impose some structure in order to survive. The humour, which had made Harris a peer of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk, is notably absent.
It's like Harris is pacing himself. Each of the songs has its role to play, sometimes dance-y, sometimes more--it freaks me out to say this--reflective. "Burns Night," for example, is a loping late-night instrumental jazz jam, seemingly designed to encourage drunk patrons to roll home, while "Limits" is full of robotized regret.
Ready for the Weekend is simultaneously a more utilitarian and more serious album. Its 90s aesthetic aims to please with its piano chords and house-soul backing vocals. "Stars Come Out" reminded me of nothing less than the dancey tracks from Moby's Everything is Wrong, which I'm quite sure Harris wouldn't take as a compliment.
But when you're self-consciously producing a retro album, I suppose that effective emulation is an accomplishment. There are four tracks here that would not drive me from the dancefloor and two more--"I'm Not Alone" and "Dance Wiv Me"--that I would scramble across a crowded room to turn up. It's a far cry from I Created Disco but it's still a better batting average than most pop-dance albums (though I suppose that one could say that Lady GaGa had raised the bar in this regard).
It's the future I fear for. The best track, "Dance Wiv Me" an electro-hip-hop collaboration with Dizee Rascal, predates the rest of the album. Harris' more methodical direction seems to be taking hi further and further away from what made him such a lovable sod.
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