PICK OF THE WEEK
Axwell
Centre Of The Universe (Axtone)
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I'm gonna come right out and say it: I love shit like this. Euro-EDM is our generation's hair metal: naff, predictable, made to sound as great as possible in second-tier European football stadiums, but undeniably infectious and massive. It doesn't really resemble dance music in the Theo Parrish sense at all; it's Jump by Van Halen reimagined for beachfront tiki bars rather than mid-western parking lots. Sickly, continental and sweet, it's musical Nutella.
Alice In Chains
Voices (Capitol)
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You've gotta hand it to Alice In Chains: never has a band taken so many drugs and been through so much, yet still come up with such terminally uninspiring music. How can a band whose career was fuelled entirely by lunchtime speedballs at the Viper Room sound so anemic? It doesn't add up. They've seen the abyss and come back nonplussed. This latest offering, following the 2011 death of their bassist, Mike Starr, should be all grisly riffs and doomy drug redemption. Instead, this acoustic-based ballad sounds like it could have ended a mid-season episode of Smallville.
Daft Punk
Lose Yourself To Dance (Columbia)
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Those happy, carefree days before the rapturous disappointment that was Random Access Memories seem far, far away, don't they? Now that the hype dust has settled and the last few cranks crying out, "It's a grower!" have been silenced, we're left with a couple of deformed follow-up singles and a heart full of resentment. It's a nice enough ditty, the kind of thing you might tap your foot to on a TOTP re-run. But, really, it was supposed to be more than that, wasn't it?
Rudimental Feat Foxes
Right Here (Asylum)
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Rudimental are a weird one: an electronic boyband on a lonely mission to bring back soulful breakbeat, while everyone else is sailing HMS Deep House towards an early watery grave. There's a good track in here somewhere, but the Nice Steel Drums Bit is lost under a shock-and-awe assault of overproduced stadium D&B. It makes the whole thing sound like a too-ambitious segue between Jamie xx and Dillinja in a student union DJ set.
Mikky Ekko
Kids (RCA)
Mikky Ekko - Kids on MUZU.TV.
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With a name like this, you'd rightly expect Mikky to be a sexually provocative fash-trap star from the pages of Dazed & Confused. But Mr Ekko is, in fact, a singer-songwriter who you'd swear was Scandinavian but is actually American. And he's even got more in common with OneRepublic than a young hip thing like Sasha Go Hard. Although he has worked with Clams Casino and Ryan Hemsworth. So slippery, these new singers. He's either paying good money to be seen with the cool kids, or the Soundcloud dons are plotting a Radio 2 playlist coup. As for the song? It's an ad man's dream: Daniel Powter, gone a bit cool.
