The CLUAS Archive: 1998 - 2011

05

A review of the album 'Ready for the weekend' by Calvin Harris

Calvin Harris - Ready for the weekendReview Snapshot:
"Ready for the weekend" is a disco pop sugar rush. Set a late noughties  badly lit overcrowded nightclub to music and you get the picture. "Kid A" it ain't. But that's not a bad thing.

The Cluas Verdict? 7 out of 10

Full Review:
If you're on the top deck on the bus home on a Friday evening and if you're sitting near the back of the bus where the cool kids sit and if you're distracted by two mid teen shop girls with fingerless gloves and if they're simultaneously gossiping, checking text messages, and chewing gum and if they're listening to an MP3 player on a mobile phone with one girl jiggling one earphone wedged in her shell like and the other girl fiddling with the other earphone and if they're la-la-ing and saying "this one is f**kin' great" there's a strong possibility they're both listening to Calvin Harris' "Ready for the weekend".  

"Ready for the weekend" is hedonism rather than music. This album is a guilty pleasure recorded and released a few days ago rather than some time in the eighties. It's best heard on a Friday night when you're getting ready to go out on the town, when you're on your way to getting out on the town, or when you're on the town and out if it. Harris arranged and wrote the whole album but he freely admits that he does not have a singing note on his head so he puts his voice through Auto tunes.  

Don't worry about the devil in the detail - let's just say Harris is the Aldi equivalent of Mylo - he is of the generation that has no inner thought and that has to let the world know everything about itself - his middle name is Facebook. When he tweets he rages, at different times he's at odds with hacks, producers, TV presenters, even himself, but you can forgive him everything because he writes near perfect pop songs with tight arrangements and banging - absolutely banging  - tunes. He even makes Dizzee Rascal sound cool and slightly threatening - "Dance wiv me" is a no brains floor filler with Rascal putting out more front, arrogance and machismo in four minutes twenty four seconds than Mick Jagger could generate in forty years.  There's lots of innits and tings but if "Dance wiv me" does not make you dance you must be living in a sensory deprivation tank. Mid seventies, Jagger himself would have died for "Yeah Yeah Yeah la la la", it's an insanely catchy piece of falsetto fluff about absolutely nothing made for party people that eat their meals off a mirror.

The album's title track and hit single is and will always be a disposable classic - a cheap drum machine intro, a twitchy self obsessed preening little verse and Mary Pearce bellows out a shout out chorus that can be understood in any language, on any dance floor, in any nightclub and at the back of any bus - "I put on my shoes and I'm ready for the weekend".

Pop music is one of life's great perishables. Again, Jagger had one of pop's nastiest but best lines - who needs yesterday's papers? "Ready for the weekend" has no shelf life to speak of. It prides itself on being transient, cheap fun. Listen to "Ready for the weekend", and soon, before it begins to smell funny.  

Anthony Morrissey


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