Superb dance or pop music is not too difficult to find--unless you happen to be surfing your FM radio stations. For every great dance-pop track produced by a big-label act (and there are a few), listeners have to wade through denizens of derivative drivel. Twenty-five years ago, bands in the vein of Australia's Cut Copy actually received mainstream airplay--think New Order, OMD, Tears for Fears, Pet Shop Boys. But fast forward to the present and almost everything that passes for Top 40 radio is a bad club song--awful lyrics, lowbrow beats, and unimaginative rhythms fill the airwaves.
Fortunately, Cut Copy are caring curators of the dance-pop past. The band's third album, Zonoscope, is proof that dance music can be exciting and sexy without sounding sleazy. With a firm grasp of avant garde aural textures (the album was produced by Ben Allen of Merriweather Post Pavillion fame), Cut Copy loads up on never-ending layers of beautiful synths, funky guitars, and groove-inducing percussion. Somehow, the globe-trotting tracks still feel spacious, allowing Dan Whitford's hypnotic vocals to smooth everything over.
Zonoscope jumps off from the fantastic In Ghost Colours and promises a buoyant and bright engagement--the hooks, drops, and runs literally glitter across the album. Not surprisingly, a starry-eyed euphoria dominates the record, and as the songs bleed into each other, culminating with the 15-minute "Sun God," one senses that pop bliss was never so close at hand.
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