Calvin Harris is Ready For The Weekend

By Muna Noor  •  in Review
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Z56le7-H4[/youtube]

There are many reasons we love Calvin Harris. He is Scottish. Ahah! He likes the food section in Marks & Spencer - as do we. And next to Mike Skinner aka The Streets, Calvin writes the most interesting tweets around. Unfortunately he also had a little bit of a Twitter epi last week following some not so savoury reviews of his second album Ready For The Weekend, which is out TODAY. Yes, after 2 years of pouring his heart and soul into this work, the man clearly felt a little under appreciated, and can you blame him? You can follow the vitriol at twitter.com/calvin harris, but to cut a long story short Calv laid into journos/rich kids who skip through tracks over lunch and hastily appoint it with minimal stars. Our favourite quote: “RICH PEOPLE MEAN FUCK ALL TO ME SERIOUSLY. I’M MAKING MUSIC FOR REAL PEOPLE AND REAL PEOPLE DANCE – RICH PEOPLE STAND AT THE BACK”.

The pop disco fabulousness of his 2nd single (correction courtesy of Vaiz) off Ready For The Weekend featuring a vid full of fit birds in their swimmers appears above, click it. You’ll also want to check out the High Contrast Remix which is definitely jumping! More reason to love Calvin Harris after the jump.

As we were saying Calvin Harris is bloody brilliant, as his music and Twitter feed readily attests. He loves sandwiches, hates lime marmalade, digs hip hop and funk, wears silly sunglasses, is into forensic science and has given us plenty reason to hit the floor and throw silly shapes in tracks like ‘Acceptable In the 80s’ and the outrageous ‘ The Girls’, which came off one super fine 1st album I Created Disco.

Folks like Deadmaus wanna remix his music, and if that’s not proof enough of musical genius, you only need to listen to his rework of  Mr Hudson ft Kanye West’s Supernova, which is by far the best that I have heard. He has also remixed for Passion Pit (‘The Reeling’), The Hours (‘See The Light’) and some other folks like Katy Perry, but who cares about that.

I was at the Club Koko Asia night at Barsonic at the weekend and when it’s ressie Johnny Mayo dropped ‘Dance Wiv Me’, it dawned on me that it’s thanks to grime-dance crossovers like this that this overlooked urban music sound is finally getting heard, and for someone who lurves grime and think it’s criminal it doesn’t get respect, even a lighter version reaching out to a wider audience is a damn good thing. You never know where it might take new fans – hopefully to go checkout its talents like Sway (another of my faves), Wiley and more. There have been other examples of this cross-genre polination : Wiley’s ‘Wearing My Rolex’, Dizzee Rascal’s work with the Basement Jaxx, but Calvin Harris collab with Dizzee on last year’s ‘Dance Wiv Me’ wasn’t just an infectiously bouncy popstastic dance-grime one-off on his part, he’s since chased it up with follow up single ‘Holiday’ which he produced for Dizzee and features Chrome.

So what did we learn? Look beyond the review. Go check Calvin Harris’ new album out for yourself.  Aside the eponymous title track it also features the dance stormer and 1st single (correction courtesy of Vaiz again) ‘I’m Not Alone’, and the grimetastic ‘Dance Wiv Me’ and we’re guessing will launch yet more fab singles yet with even more fab remixes.

Calvin Harris’ Ready For The Weekend is out now on Sony Music. Follow him at twitter.com/calvinharris and try on his super sunnies at www.calvinharris.co.uk. JUICE interviews Calvin in the September issue of the magazine.