Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Mark Ronson f/ Daniel Merriweather :: "Stop Me"From Versions (Columbia; 2007)
Ronson’s already put out some sharp nosed stuff, soul-scrimping for Ghostface, pushing signature sounds for Amy Winehouse and Lilly Allen, signing Rhymefest. Ronson’s plied and proven his trade, and it’s a natty job at that. The recent release of his Version covers record makes it more than transparent how his “sound” is not so much decided by the filtered genres of all the diverse artists he’s worked with, or by some newfangled gene pool of wildly cross-referenced samples, but instead is sifted into his own musical sieve: this can go in, that can’t, that one might be able to, so it can’t. He isn’t so much pushing the bracket as circumscribing the confines, operating within the now-commercially viable box of genre reinterpretations. As such, “Stop Me” functions as one would expect it to: swap Johnny Marr’s preppy guitar flourishes for insistent synth, treacle the bass and inflate the whole affair with a kind of soul-sucking pseudo-bombast not so far off from the Lighthouse Family.
Alan Baban :: 24 April 2007 |
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