Review: Ready For The Weekend

Ready For The Weekend, Calvin Harris (2009)

Calvin Harris' Ready For The Weekend is a stereotypically techno album. It can be described most basically as a collection of voice cuts, dots and beeps generally arranged to try and make something meaningful. In this respect, it fails dramatically.

The singles off the album are perhaps the only bearable ones on it; either dull repetition or some basic differentials are their cheif hallmarks, and when one considers this twelve single album has only five bearable singles by Calvin himself, then that doesn't really shine a light on his career.

The only thing in the album's favour is "I'm not Alone", a quite dark but quirky number that stands as the album's most popular Calvin-only track. That and the natural habit of the body to respond positively to a heavy beat. The rest simply fade into insignificance, their lyricisms and beats either too mundane or useless to be of any value.

To steal from Charlie Brooker, this is not music, it is "content". It's music deliberately made to fill a stereotypical niche, and whether it actually wants to be there is out of the question. This form of techno fills the "Repetitive Techno Ballad" niche, and while it fails to stir any emotion whatsoever it gets "repeptitive" and "techno" just right. Not that that's a good thing.

Take another artist of similar ability and genre; La Roux, for instance. Yes, she uses repetitive rythems. Yes she uses synthesisers and CG obsessively. But she makes it work. She manages to find just the right balance between the allure of CG and the emotion-stirring nature of the ballad. She's not only younger than Harris, but has had a lot less time to get her act together.

I give Ready For The Weekend a light 36% rating. Some of the tracks work. There are tracks I love. But on the whole, it's an empty callous of CG and misjointed intention.

Thanks.