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Calvin Harris’s success, you might infer from the title track of his debut album, has gone to his head. Having risen from Marks & Spencers shelf stacker via a MySpace promotional Blitzkrieg to Kylie Minogue’s latest production whizz in a matter of months, he is now laying claim to the invention of an entire genre. Of course Harris, who is 23 and from Dumfries, didn’t really create disco. He’s just having us on, the wag.
In fact, if there’s a genre that infuses I Created Disco, it’s electro. The sparse, jerky sound has been the default setting on the synths of so many dance producers in recent years and ran through Harris’s crossover hit Acceptable in the 80s.
Once his Scottishness and penchant for cartoonish lyrics had also been noted, comparisons with Mylo, another electro-powered success story from north of Hadrian’s Wall, became inevitable. Like his Skye-born peer, Harris veers from the standard dancefloor route by recording many of his own vocals (in a decadent falsetto) rather than simply sampling other people’s, and having a genuine live show of some note.
However, he would probably prefer you to compare his music with the wry output of James Murphy’s more credible LCD Soundsystem. The Girls, in which he louchely espouses his eclectic taste in women, and Colours, in which he louchely espouses his eclectic taste in, erm, colours, certainly aspire to LCD-style ironic sloganeering. But they lack the subtle sting and self-deprecation of Murphy’s work; on tracks such as Vegas and This is the Industry, Harris actually seems in thrall to the in-crowd faddishness that he aspires to lampoon.
Recorded by Harris for zero pounds on a battered old Amiga computer in his bedroom, this is a record that’s studiedly retro and determinedly nonchalant. The plink-plonk backing of Neon Rocks apes the sound effects of vintage video games, while Merrymaking at My Place is a breezily brazen snapshot of after-hours drug taking.
There’s DIY cheek by the bucketload – it’s not hard to see why the Calvin Harris MySpace fanclub now numbers more than 37,000. But if Harris wants any of them to be interested in five years time, he needs to add ideas to the insouciance.
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