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As befits a band currently riding high their single Rather Be is the fastest-selling of the year so far the debut album by Clean Bandit opens bullishly. The first thing you hear is a cocksure defence of dance music against those who would decry it as lightweight or meaningless: the same people, presumably, that Rolling Stone magazine was targeting when it released that online advert claiming that house, techno et al were but a passing fad, destined to wither any moment in the face of "real music". This seems a remarkably optimistic hypothesis, given that it's nearly 30 years since Jack Your Body made No 1, but there's presumably somebody out there thick enough to believe it, and Clean Bandit have them in their sights. "So you think electronic music is boring? You think it's stupid? You think it's repetitive?" asks a sneering voice on the intro to Mozart's House, the implication being that even the most benighted soul, steadfast in the hoary belief that disco still sucks, will have their mind changed by what follows.
Alas, what follows is a featherweight pop-dance track, decorated with ropey rapping and a couple of chunks of Mozart's String Quartet No 21. It's hard to avoid the dispiriting feeling that Clean Bandit believe the latter is the real clincher in their argument that dance music is neither boring nor stupid: elsewhere on New Eyes, they do something similar with a bit of Dvorák, while tracks such as A&E arrive laden with quasi-classical string arrangements of the quartet's own composition.
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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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