Ali Love’s full-length debut is professional, polished and dull as fuck. Bland dance pop with the requisite dash of retro synth, ‘Love Harder’ is not so much bad as pure filler. The album is full of the kind of songs you tolerate in the hope that the DJ will put something more exciting on next. Rising to brief prominence after guesting on the Chemical Brother’s ‘Do It Again’, Ali Love was promptly dropped by Columbia and the evidence suggests that the big boys knew what they were doing. That’s not to say there aren’t the makings of some good songs – ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ is a fairly catchy pop song; ‘Moscow Girl’ wears its ‘80s revival heart on its sleeve; ‘Done The Dirty’ benefits from vocals by New Young Pony Club’s Lou Hayter, and so on. But there’s nothing here that you can’t easily get elsewhere, and better. Part of the problem is that Ali Love desperately wants to be Prince, but my overarching beef with ‘Love Harder’ is that it’s fundamentally an empty experience. This is assembly line dance pop at its most automated. There’s not even much satisfaction in being mean to ‘Love Harder’ – it’d be like curb stomping an egg timer or telling a toaster to go fuck itself.
