Calvin Harris - I Created Disco

Here’s a man that needs no press release. From fruit stacker at Mark & Spencers to Kylie cohort in months, he’s got love for you if you were born in the ‘80s and he now claims to know all the girls – that’s an entire CV in one sentence, right there. Concocted in his Dumfries bedroom-cum-sound laboratory, Calvin Harris has ridden the Myspace wave to Mika levels of ubiquity. No branch of Topshop or T4 ident is left untouched. But does greater omnipresence than God make for a good album? It’s getting increasingly hard to tell.

As time accelerates faster than ever before, it feels like we have all lived with this record forever – some feat considering it isn’t even out yet (or is, depending on when you read this). For record company Sony BMG, Calvin represents the perfect investment – a media-conscious polymath who wrote, played recorded and produced this entire album, then handed it over as a finished product for them to slap their imprint on. This does at least lend the artist freedom, but since Harris himself admits there is very little meaning to most of his output, this opportunity is slightly wasted in this instance. What? What was acceptable in the ‘80s? In terms of vague and annoyingly open-ended pop statements, it sits right up there with I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that. What, for fuck’s sake? WHAT? Damnit.

Certainly, Harris has squandered hours, days and months on this venture, but he’s probably spent just as long personally accepting Myspace friends and sticking packing wrap to the front of his sunglasses. All good, but by now the world has realised that Myspace is a vacuum where no one can hear you scream and has moved on to Facebook. The problem with style over content is that style changes, and with increasing frequency. For example, you can now build two pairs of jeans from the material three months ago it took to make one.

Towards its tail end, there are squelches that could imply a human heart conceived this. Take the unlikely ‘Love Souvenir’, which as the title suggests sounds like a wet patch. ‘Vegas’ adds sparkle but runs suspiciously close to territory covered in ‘Acceptable In The 80s’. This leaves the interstellar wigging of the title track and following lick ‘Disco Heat’ to really make Harris’s case. But even here, you sense this is an album engineered as a gateway to LCD Soundsystem, and the most recent LCD Soundsystem album has already done a better job of that this year.

Great music is made of excitement and the sense of the unknown – with this, there is a faint whiff of disappointment, like ‘the industry’ really isn’t all it is cracked up to be. And by the time Calvin has cooked up his midmorning blog, you already know what he had for breakfast that day. There’s enough here to get feet tapping, but taken out of its natural habitat – Topshop and those T4 idents again – it feels slightly hollow.