The grey area

Here are a couple of artists who I don’t know whether to take seriously. Calvin Harris seems to go out of his way on his recordings to be schmaltzy and kitschy, to a degree that might otherwise be taken as totally ironic. But he keeps making tracks like that, so he has to be somewhat serious about it. His latest album, Ready for the Weekend, opens on an elevator muzak sax solo, and remains about as campy as an Erasure record throughout, even reviving the late-’90s, hyper-cheesy, high-range epic trance synth midway through the album, on “I’m Not Alone” and “Flashback.” A couple of years ago, I even asked him about it on the telephone. He was blubbering and talking in such a low, self-pitying tone that he sounded like a teenager on the brink of existential crisis. I could have just as easily concluded that he was teasing me, that he detested doing interviews so much that he decided to pull a Sigur Rós on me, or that he was sincerely deeply depressed and only making this sort of music to cheer himself up, as he told me. Either way, the music’s certainly catchy and of extremely polished pop production calibre.

Then there’s Laidback Luke. His tracks and remixes are reasonably versatile and solidly produced, but always seem to fall somewhere within that same weird late-’90s corporate dance style, when the stadium DJs were translating rave music into a more profitable endeavour. Ask yourself, when you listen to Darude’s “Sandstorm,” is it silly, serious, or does it even matter? If the answer is “I hate that shit,” I’m guessing this show isn’t for you.

These two aberrations appear this Friday, March 19, at Metropolis, along with fellow DJs Brodinski, Sound of Stereo, Nero, Love Thy Brother and Kid Aloha.

“PUT ON A SMILE AND IT WILL BE ALRIGHT.”
jack.oatmon@gmail.com