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Ali Love

Back Yard Recordings / Dim Mak Records

The old saying has it that good things come to those who wait. Ali Love’s story provides a new twist on that saying: even better things come from those who wait.

You probably remember the name Ali Love from the string of brilliant and eclectic solo singles that he pumped out in 2006 and 2007. Singles like the riotous, traffic-stopping commentary on a night of ill-advised excess, K-Hole, from 2006, or his chart-scraping Secret Sunday Lover in 2007, or the dancefloor glitter of Late Night Sessions from that same year. You definitely recall his insistent vocal from the Chemical Brothers’ international hit single Do It Again, also released in 2007, even if you were never quite sure who provided that memorable hook. He became the buzz name amongst the music magazines and blogs tipping artists to watch over the next 12 months. As the year closed out, the world seemed set fair to be Ali’s oyster.

For Ali, musical mind-expansion came easily. He grew up in the Norfolk countryside, where his parents were part of a community of artistic bohemians. His earliest memory of music was sitting in his mum’s car, Al Green, Marvin Gaye and Grace Jones blasting out.

His elder brothers also offered a choice of sounds. In Ben’s bedroom it was early electro and hip hop, while his other brother Jasper preferred The Beach Boys or the more obscure avant-garde blues-rock of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Their dad, meanwhile, would listen to jazz.

But the music that Ali returned with from his round-the-world trip in early 2008 was going to be different to his more scattershot earlier output. He wanted to make something minimal, melodic – something for both mind and feet.

What Ali Love does on his debut album is craft super-contagious dance-pop songs, music that’s full of both romantic longing and boggle-eyed lust, that’s influenced by both Italian house rhythms and psychedelic vocal melodies, by vintage keyboards/drum-machines and state of the art production, by both the sounds of yesterday and the ideas of tomorrow. It’s music of perfectly balanced contradictions. If MGMT or Empire Of The Sun had come of musical age on the day-glo dancefloors of London and Ibiza instead of in the guitar-shops of suburban New York and Sydney, they might sound a little like this.

There’s a great story lurking in each of the songs Ali recorded in his East London studio alongside producer and co-pilot Martin Dubka. Highlights include the sub-bass heavy future hit single Smoke & Mirrors “It’s about living for an illusion,” says Ali. Doing The Dirty, a cautionary tale for the cheating male that’s all based, alas, on hard-won experience and upon which Lou HAYTER of New Young Pony Club helps sing the chorus; the minimal, yearning Italio-pop of limited-edition first single Diminishing Returns, a title Ali coined after bumping into Maxi Jazz from Faithless in Ibiza at the tail end of a six-day party. When Ali told Maxi he was feeling a little jaded after his marathon bender, Maxi wisely explained his lifestyle was a case of diminishing returns. “I thought that was a really good description for the lifestyle of a lot of my generation,” says Ali. “Because we’re a generation of massive caners, but at some point you find yourself just chasing your tail.”

There’s also Show Me, which Ali wrote with Marcus J Knight, and which Ali describes as being “a Foreigner synth rock thing. It’s like a boxing song, something to sing walking down the street with your chest pumped out.” And then there’s second single Love Harder, which was influenced by the stripped-back 808 drum-machine dynamics of Kanye West’s Love Lock Down. “Stripping things back to their very core and just putting a beautiful vocal melody on top excites me,” explains Ali. “That and using sub-bass. A lot of sub-bass. Because girls respond to deep bass. And, ultimately, that’s a very interesting prospect.”

Ali may discover the response over-whelming, and not just from womankind…

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Ali Love — Smoke And Mirrors – MyVideo