In 1988, in The Manual: How to Have a Number 1 The Easy Way, Bill Drummond wrote: “We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul.”
It looks like a reduction ad absurdum, but it’s completely true, and serves us as a principle of discernment better than ever in an era of mind-frying abundance, when every possible template of music exists repeated in untold near-identical permutations. There’s quite a lot, for example, of synth-pop everywhere: the music that started in the great 1980s revival of the turn of the millennium and has absorbed bits and bobs of modern stuff but essentially never needed to significantly evolve since. Eighties survivors like Kylie and Erasure’s Andy Bell, later additions like Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Gaga, Steps, Little Boots, Tove Lo all tap into the same stream of glitterball, sex, effervescence – to a point where it could be hard to pull apart certain songs technically, yet the difference between getting it right and not is always glaring.
It’s especially glaring here on Swedish singer Robyn’s first album in eight years. She was launched as a kind of soft R&B star in the 90s, but since going independent and finding her voice with the huge global smash “Heartbeat” in the 00s she’s been avowedly synth/dance pop – and is back on that with a bang now. Every track in this album is built on instantly familiar patterns, and you can hear all kinds of echoes, of Kylie and Madonna and Daft Punk and Stuart Price, but that principle of Drummond’s hits hard here. It only takes a single listen to hear that – especially in comparison with the diminishing returns of recent Kylie albums, or the oddly subdued personality of Alison Goldfrapp’s comeback – this is the version of this sound, the one with sex and soul, the one with explosive love of melody and big kick drums and zappping lasers and pirouetting on the dancefloor. Sometimes discernment is just easy: and Robyn makes it a doddle. This is GREAT.
Listen to "Dopamine":
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