For the most part, listening to dance-y, club-y house ought to be like eating candy: simple, tasty, and sugary, without too much silly extra shit to get in the way. At best, it’s fun and energizing; at worst, it’s repetitive or showy or poorly mixed. There’s a time-tested formula for getting people to dance like maniacs, and though the formula has room for experimentation, straying too far from the recipe means risking your audience. Club music must be a crowd pleaser.
French producer Vitalic has a strong grasp of this concept. His new record, Rave Age, does a wonderful job of drawing together many different tropes in the recent history of EDM to create an album full of fun, danceable music that’s not dull, indulgent, or so blitzed out. The music feels intelligent and well-designed, more like an album of dance floor compositions than tracks (album stand-out “Stamina”) and the record fits together into an arc of styles and beats that doesn’t disappoint. Particularly impressive is the blend of digital and analog synthesis employed by Vitalic, which shows an equal grasp of recent EDM synth whizzes like Diplo and old-school analog heads like that guy from M83 and Deadmau5. It’s well-mixed, with plenty of detail-oriented moves that often give an otherwise-drab tune a pick-me-up; I’m not terribly impressed with the mastering, which is sort of oddly treble-y and even a little bit hiss-y from time to time.
But Vitalic’s record is sort of a dead-end; though well-constructed it doesn’t have much in the way of follow through. As a DJ, they’re too, er, arena-anthemic to play in the club, and as a listener, they’re just a hair too house-y to get much home play. Imagine if Daft Punk and Ryat made an album together and you’ll sort of get the picture. Songs like “Under Your Sun” and “Lucky Star” are the real high points of the album for me because they seem to more firmly commit to one aesthetic (“Under…” is spacey and sad, “Lucky Star” is French house in the best tradition). But the rest of the album seems sort of disappointingly unresolved.
3.5 / 5 bars
Vitalic – “Stamina”
02 Stamina
Vitalic – “Lucky Star”
09 Lucky Star
Vitalic – “Under Your Skin”
05 Under Your Sun
