For his latest album, Record Collection, London Superproducer Mark Ronson goes for a more 80s synth-pop feel. No matter that he's made his reputation on funk and soul hip-hop numbers, whatever he does works. Apparently, Ronson wanted to be so authentic to the 80s sound that he went out and procured the actual synths that Duran Duran used. Even the album cover (above) has an 80s theme, deftly mixing the themes of 80s album artwork together.
Bang Bang Bang is eminently danceable and features one of the all-time great MCs, Q-Tip the Abstract. The Bike Song is good fun and Someone To Love Me features Boy George. Though the original for Someone To Love Me is good, the remixes are even better.
Sia is my favorite. She's adorable. She can sing like an angel. She's quirky. She has great visual style (check out that album cover). She writes fun, pop music with an undertone of earnest emotion. You will love her.
I pretty much like all of the tracks on her new album, but here are my favorites:
Clap Your Hands is a pure pop gem without being saccharine sweet.
You've Changed is a hot dance track. Remixes already abound. The ones with Detroit DJ Lauren Flax are particularly good. (I like the original remix, but I couldn't find a link for it.)
The Fight is an anthem, perfect for singing along, pumping your fist, and jumping around.
Stop Trying is a throwback to 80s pop, a la Katrina and the Waves or Tears for Fears.
In the heyday of the 80s, bands wore tight leather pants, had bushy manes of manly hair, band names that sounded vaguely tough, ridiculous album covers, and the music was HEAVY METAL. Welcome, Wolfmother, to the 80s. Wolfmother just plain rocks. They play muscular metal that doesn't wander off into speed, stoner, satanic, prog, thrash, punk, or any other adjective you can put in front of metal. It's just plain heavy metal. And it rocks.
Wolfmother hit it slightly large on their eponymous first album with the descriptively titled single, Woman. The cover is a dark painting of a pale half-naked woman with wings and a tail standing on the shore of a raging ocean. Wolfmother are not subtle and are unapologetically simple. Other songs on Wolfmother, the album, that rock are Tales, Love Train, and Vagabond. Vagabond was used to great effect as the soundtrack to the great montage sequence in (500) Days of Summer when our romantic hero returns from a broken heart by rededicating his life to the manly pursuit of architecture.
On Wolfmother's latest release, Cosmic Egg, they continue to perfect their heavy rocking, high-pitched singing style. My favorite tracks are: New Moon Rising (the get tough song), White Feather (the radio sing-a-long), In The Morning (the power ballad), 10,000 Feet (the scary song), Cosmonaut (the sci-fi song), Caroline (more power balladry), and Phoenix (the rock epic).
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