One thing about loving any genre of music or book is that you tend to love it DESPITE the obvious problems inherent with it. In Romance as a genre you tend to like the stories DESPITE the ever present problems with forced HEAs and with Dance music you tend to love it DESPITE the problems with Dance albums where the artist finds one production trick or one style or sound and works the damn thing to death. By the time you are done with the typical Dance album DESPITE the number of songs on the album and DESPITE the fact they all have different names you have been put through so much repetitive mirror images of the same cut and the exact same techniques over and over again you are over it.
Well, I hear you there and I do try and find albums that hold some interest and try to be something more than your typical grind. Here on this album done back in 2004 Junkie XL did something I really wished he had kept doing. He created a concept with the heart of a Dance album but the format of a radio program. Making sure to keep the styles and techniques for each cut danceable but different and he wanted to pay much homage to the eighties singers of old.
To that end he did not hire the whole band to recreate their glory days but instead wisely chose the lead singer and had people like Gary Numan sing Angels for him. You remember Gary Numan and his Cars right? Junkie XL then went on to have Robert Smith from The Cure sing Perfect Blue Sky and Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode chime in with Reload. To make all this work even better every song has a great beat involved but each artist is singing in a style of song that feels a lot like something he and his band mates would have recorded back in the good old days.
So with all these big names on this album I am surprised this did not get more air play. Well you know, Mainstream radio just is not into anything that does not have immediate appeal to advertisers anymore and even MTV stopped playing music on the television a long time ago. Anyway, if you might not be that into Dance albums but you have a hankering for the eighties go ahead and give this one a shot. Unfortunately it is not on iTunes so you will have to go for the Amazon hookup here.
Tags: Music
