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Tensnake - Glow

Name: Tensnake - Glow
Item: Tensnake - Glow
Author: Andrew Ryce

Veröffentlicht
Mar 26, 2014
Worte
Andrew Ryce
Label
Astralwerks
CDV 3123
Veröffentlicht
March 2014
Genres
House · Pop

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Marco Niemerski's music is cheesy, but we love him for it. His knack for deliriously happy songs ("Coma Cat," his remix of "Reckless With Your Love") has led to brushes with the mainstream, which he finally embraced with 2012's "Mainline" on Defected, a rote exercise in '90s vocal house that only earned him a bigger audience. Now he's signed to Astralwerks, and with the full force of the pop machine behind him, Glow is his unmistakable grab at the charts—but one still suffused with some of that old Tensnake glimmer. The resulting album is every bit as conflicting as that sounds. Glow dumbs down Niemerski's music into mass market-ready chunks. It's like he's taken a coat of plastic wrap and applied it liberally to the whole album, leaving it texturally uniform and smooth, but curiously distant. There are wrinkles in such an all-encompassing approach, particularly the instrumentals, which are so atrocious it's hard to fathom why they were included at all. Thankfully, the majority of Glow features vocalists to fill the blanks. Outside of two spots from Jeremy Glenn and Jamie Lidell, the album may as well be credited to Tensnake and Fiora, the Australian singer who steals the spotlight from her producer more than once. Fiora makes a fine foil. Her breathy ad-libs are hooks in themselves, she's emotive without overdoing it and she tackles generic pop fare with real enthusiasm. She's the kind of guest you might imagine on a Disclosure track—which is probably a better reference point for Glow than anything in Tensnake's discography. Glow's most successful songs channel the demure sexiness of lite FM radio, bolstered with powerful basslines and floor-ready percussion. The bumping Nile Rodgers collaboration "Love Sublime," the sultry "Kill The Time" and the yearning "No Relief" are all excellent fodder for a more mature pop playlist. The album has its fair share of bad ideas, and when Niemerski falls, he falls hard. The Jeremy Glenn-featuring "Selfish" sounds like the theme song for a straight-to-DVD romantic comedy, while the confounding "No Colour" briefly erupts with dubstep wobbles, as if Niemerski fell asleep on his computer and hit the wrong button. To his credit, though, he generally avoids rehashing "Coma Cat," only borrowing its vibe for the album's one decent instrumental, "Things Left To Say." An album full of quirky pop like this could have been a knockout, but instead, Niemerski has pulled his punches and delivered a record full of closely-groomed pop house. Fans may welcome some of the record's fluffier moments, and there are some tunes that could go down in the Tensnake catalogue as classics. Taken as a whole, however, listening to Glow is bit like trying to eat dessert for dinner—sweet enough to make you sick, and empty enough to leave you wanting something more substantial.
Tracklist