Album Review : Calvin Harris - Ready For The Weekend
- Written by Jon Fletcher
Cycling into work today, a bloke on a bike infront of me cut inside of a bus as it turned a corner in King's Cross, almost flattening him. Unable to admonish the culprit, who jumped the next lights and headed off down Euston Road, the driver wound down his window and administered a perfunctory bollocking to me as a convenient representative of the wider cycling public. Instead of responding with my usual out of breath and consequently pubescently pitched "fuck you", I just smiled. I smiled because Calvin Harris' second album Ready For The Weekend was blarting away in my right ear.
This says very little about the quality of the album, but quite a lot about its suitability as an accompaniment to cycling on London's roads. To put this another way, if you can only spare 5 percent of your brain for music while the other 95 percent keeps you alive, 'Ready For The Weekend' is as good a soundtrack as any. If you're doing something a little less taxing - sitting on the bus or the tube, say - then the odds are you'll find it wanting.
The problem with laying into Calvin Harris for lacking substance is that he's never pretended to be aiming for musical nirvana. No-one buys a Harris album expecting some textured opus. What Joe Public wants from Ready For The Weekend is a meaty slab of Legoland electro - the sort of paint by numbers dance music that feels as though it could have been composed on a high school keyboard using a random collection of preset demos. In fact, Harris originally burst to fame two years ago because he'd basically done exactly that - sat in his bedroom, learned to twiddle a few knobs and spilled out I Created Disco - a collection of daft but catchy, sloganeering tracks with just a hint of LCD Soundsystem.
Listening to his latest album, you can't help but feel that I Created Disco was less a product of Harris' own musical direction and more a product of the bands he was listening to at the time. 'Ready For The Weekend' feels like a catalogue of forgeries spanning most of the dance of the last twenty years - good and bad - from Justice (listen to the bass lines on 'Relax') to Ibiza house via, of all things, London Boys. Those who will admit to crossing paths with 'Twelve Commandments of Dance' in the late 80s may find sections of 'Flashback' oddly reminiscent of the shell suited duo's 'My Love'.
Harris has already claimed a number one single with the stabbing synths and reverberating bass of 'I'm Not Alone', but hell, it's summer, and the kids don't know any better. Even this track, undoubtedly one of the more compelling on the album, feels like a grubby facscimile of a genuinely great dance track. There are no twists or turns, no guile behind its build, no suspense to the drops. When Harris tries to mix things up a bit, as on the shuffling, spaced rhythms of 'Burns Night', he just ends up sounding cloying and repetitive. The addition of Dizzee Rascal on last year's single, 'Dance Wiv Me' offers a welcome new angle, but the background synths are as predictable as they are toe-tappingly accessible.
Of course, none of this is much of a criticism. Calvin Harris makes production-line music for the masses and Ready For The Weekend will doubtless go down a storm. But this is the aural equivalent of boshing on the TV when you get home from work and turning your brain down to three. Those same masses enthusiastically downloading the album now will have stashed it on the e-shelf within a couple of weeks to gather dust with the other inconsequential pap they've accumulated on the basis of singles they grew bored of after a week. In the meantime, why not save yourself the both and listen to genuinely good music made by genuinely talented people? Or if you really want dot-to-dot dance, buy a keyboard in a car boot sale and do it yourself.