There's been a very short list of singles that have stopped me in my tracks, (or in the middle of a spreadsheet as the case may be) leaving me to remember the first time moment I heard it; and inevitably scouring the world for any trace its origins. Considering it's a rare day that goes by that I'm not listening to music for hours on end, I can only remember Everything But The Girl's "Missing," Madonna's "Music," Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," and Hard-Fi's "Cash Machine" pulling that off. Turns out this time it was Mark Ronson turning my productivity at the office to nil.
This isn't the "celebrity DJ's" first fruitful trip to the other side of the needle. Back in '04, his Nate Dogg-featuring single "Ooh Wee" did some serious dancefloor damage and he's bringing it to the tables again.
First comes the voice of Aussie blue-eyed soul singer Daniel Merriweather, not sounding far removed from Timberlake or UK-based namesake Daniel Bedingfield (before he went to shit). Then Ronson's deft production hand drops us into a sonic past/present splitscreen of breakbeats and string-laden Motown-kissed soul. The melody and lyrics do the same, mashing up The Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This Before" and the Supremes' classic "You Keep Me Hangin' On." You've got a sonic collision of the 60s, 80s, 90s, and every major outpost of the English-speaking world and yet it's never an iota as burdened by its ambitions as the listing of its parts would have you believe.
This is simply a groove-laden hip-hop jam of the first order. One so damned good that we forgive him, despite his being responsible for all the hipsters telling us how much they love Lily Allen.
