Miike Snow - a three piece consisting of singer/songwriter Andrew Wyatt of Fires of Rome Fame and the production team of Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, also known as Bloodshy & Avant. They are primarily responsible for writing pop songs and one of those was Britney Spear’s ‘Toxic’. This is the debut album from these America / Scando knob twiddlers and it’s a heads down get behind the desk approach.
Specialising in a distinctive ‘fluffy round the edges keyboard laden collage’ its as you’d expect - cleanly produced. At times it smells of vocoder (‘Silvia’) and the vocals simply float over the somewhat transparent coffee table sound at times.
Everything on this album musically sounds like its echoing out of the back of a Roland. Its distinctly low-key and almost as if MS want to remain anonymous to the general public. I don’t have an issue with music being this laid back if it remains challenging in some way. At times it tries to do this (Black & Blue), as the backward reverse guitars trail in and out of the track against a heavy synth sound that fit quite simply into the Neil Tennant meets Mika vocal style. However I cant help but feel that the vocals are simply constructed via some modern technology rather a human being belting out the lyrics in a sweaty recording booth, such is the super clean voice. Its simply flawless and quite frankly cringe worthy to be that perfect. A sense of realism and grit wouldn’t go amiss here at all!!
The album is also very heavy on the piano throughout (Sans Soleil), which might be your post ibiza (I’ve just had my first E) song as its quite blissed out and melancholy. In fact the general overview of the sound is distinctly mellifluous throughout.
For these guys to have written such a great pop track as ‘Toxic’ I would of expected something a lot better. Maybe its time they went back to writing and producing and stuck to their day job. You cant fault them for coming out of their comfort zone, but you can fault them for this pedestrian piece of electro pop.
