Apart from the excellent Delta Machine (see previous post) which I wanted to own on proper CD, I have been quite busy buying albums on MP3 recently including – Calvin Harris: 18 Months, David Guetta: Nothing But the Beat (Ultimate), Example: The Evolution of Man, Green Day: Tre, Garbage: Not Your Kind of People, DJ Fresh: Next Levelism and Sucker Punch. All of which I can recommend…
I expected Calvin Harris, David Guetta and Example to all fit into the same dancey pop bracket but Example’s album is more guitar driven than I expected with ‘proper’ songs and a bit of dubstep leaning towards DJ Fresh rather than Calvin Harris..The Calvin Harris album is similar to David Guetta in its range of tunes but without the French House overtones. Guetta sounds like Daft Punk in places. There are plenty of guest vocals on 18 Months, Nothing But the Beat and Next Levelism. They are all equally as good in my opinion (although I am leaning towards Guetta because of the Daft Punkiness and uplifting quality of the instrumental tracks). The Ultimate edition of the Guetta album features 30 tracks half of which are instrumentals which are generally very good and was a bargain on Amazon. Yes I do pay for my music. These people have put time and effort into their creations and deserve the royalties rather than being ripped off by Pirates.
The Garbage album is good but doesn’t hold any great surprises beyond the band sounding less indie and more poppy – this was to be expected as they seemed to be developing in that direction prior to their previous split up. The final Green Day album of the recent trilogy has a more mature feel than the previous two, but it still leaves me thinking that they could have been more choosey over what tracks to record and done a double LP last year instead of milking their fans for 3 lots of spends. Tre doesn’t really have any outstanding tracks as such, but is more of a coherent album than Uno and Dos.
The stand out album of the bunch listed above is the Sucker Punch album which is a collection of 9 songs from the film of the same name. It has reworkings of some great tunes including The Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’, The Pixies’ ‘Where is my Mind’ and the Beatles ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by the cast members and a great extended remix of Bjork’s ‘Army of Me’. It has a great atmosphere to it and each cover version is more than just a straight interpretation with a different singer – they have made a real effort to give each song a thorough reworking.
couchmagpie 