Dance, Dance, Dance!

Since most of you will be recovering from last night's bleeps and beats I'd like to talk about a couple of contemporary dance tracks that I like a lot. First I want to discuss Scottish giant Adam Richard Wiles aka Calvin Harris, whose poppy dance anthem 'Ready For The Weekend' is getting an awful lot of airplay on nearly every radio station. To me, the song sounds like a mash-up of an upbeat Elton John-song and an early 90s Eurohouse-chorus, but in a crazy way it works. The first Calvin Harris-song that caught my (and everyone's?) attention was of course 'Acceptable In The 80s', a ridiculously catchy track followed by the rather annoying 'The Girls' and the groovy 'Merrymaking At My Place' ("at my place baby, at my plaaaace...": lovely). This year he also surprised us by combining soft string-plucking with Tiësto-like stabbing synths in 'I'm Not Alone' and by teaming up with Dizzee Rascal and Chrome for the absolutely fantastic 'Dance Wiv Me'. Since the collabo was so succesful, Harris also produced Dizzee's after-Bonkers-single 'Holiday'. I know most of you think it's shit, but to me, the cheesy synths have just the right amount of silliness. Dizzee isn't the only one noticing Harris' production skills. Roisin Murphy and Sophie Ellis Bextor ('Off And On'), The Mitchell Brothers ('Michael Jackson') and even Kylie Minogue ('In My Arms', 'Heart Beat Rock' and the Roxy Music cover 'Love Is The Drug') counted on Harris' sound to score hits. I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing more from this Scot.

The other dance track I really like these days is 'Audacity of Huge' by the UK-duo James Ford and Jas Shaw aka Simian Mobile Disco. Yeasayer-frontman Chris Keating tries to brag and boast his disappointment away namedropping Damien Hirst, Joey Ramone, Bill Murray, Peter Tosh, James Joyce and even the Sultan of Brunei over a cool electrobeat and a fun bunch of bleeps. Other cool SMD-tracks are the lucious 'Hustler', '10,000 Horses Can't Be Wrong', 'I Believe' and 'It's The Beat'. Boom!