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.
It kicks off with a beat that belongs in one of Rocky’s infamous pumping-iron montages and, upon the arrival of the first lyric, nostalgic memories of 1980′s Prince and Jermaine Stewart are conjured up inside your head. It’s a slick, smooth psychedelic third track from Ali Love following his two self-released singles in 2006 and his vocals on The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Do It Again’. Setting a fine precedent for what will follow with Love’s debut album, ‘Love Harder’, which is out in August, ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ is packed to the rafters with vintage keyboard and a retro vibe. The combination of old-school drums with wicked electro worthy of a Space Invaders soundtrack creates an infectious kind of music that you could make war and love to. Ali Love feverishly merges the old with the new and, with ‘Smoke & Mirrors’, he is hoping to finally make his mark with some long awaited chart success. Sure to rip up dance-floors across the country, ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ is no sleight of hand, trick of the mind optical-illusion, it’s good honest music with a nu-disco slant.
