Calvin Harris ‘I Created Disco’ Album Review

So electropop is trendy now? Never mind the fact that the likes of Girls Aloud, Rachel Stevens and Kylie have been churning out high quality electropop for ages… At the forefront of this new fashionable electronica is shelf-stacker turned producer turned singer Calvin Harris, whose hit Acceptable In The 80s has become as overexposed as the footless tights and denim skirt combo.

If you liked that very catchy but annoyingly one-dimensional smash, you’re likely to enjoy his album, the modestly-titled I Created Disco. For what you get is more, much much more, of the same and errrr… a little bit more of the same too. Tracks that have a great pulsating electro beat yet proceed to stamp it again and again over the space of four minutes with little progression. Many of these tracks cry out for a radio edit in the manner of Acceptable In The 80s, which here clocks in at an alarmingly snoozeworthy five and a half minutes. They also cry out for a proper singer – there’s only so much of Harris basically talking that one can take – and songwriter. The same mind-numbingly mundane words being repeated to death reduces certain songs (‘I get all the girls I get all the girls’ multiplied by 50 on new single, The Girls) to a tedious monotony when a proper construction could have made them minor masterpieces.

At its best, on tracks like Colours and Merrymaking At My Place, Calvin Harris’ brand of pared-down electronica thoroughly deserves to be ubiquitous. At its most self-indulgently smug and crudely underdeveloped, the only popularity it deserves is that of the dumper. As it is, I Created Disco is a catchy and tuneful, though unfulfilling, album that functions on the same one-note level as a dance album.

ON REPEAT – Colours, Merrymaking At My Place

PRESS SKIP – Vegas, The Girls, This Is The Industry, I Created Disco

Click here to buy I Created Disco at amazon.co.uk >>

Rachel Read