Calvin Harris – Ready For The Weekend

Calvin Harris - Ready For The Weekend

Cycling into work today, a bloke on a bike infront of me cut inside of a bus as it turned a corner in King’s Cross, almost flattening him. Unable to admonish the culprit, who jumped the next lights and headed off down Euston Road, the driver wound down his window and administered a perfunctory bollocking to me as a convenient representative of the wider cycling public. Instead of responding with my usual out of breath and consequently pubescently pitched “fuck you”, I just smiled. I smiled because Calvin Harris‘ second album Ready For The Weekend was blarting away in my right ear.

This says very little about the quality of the album, but quite a lot about its suitability as an accompaniment to cycling on London’s roads. To put this another way, if you can only spare 5 percent of your brain for music while the other 95 percent keeps you alive, ‘Ready For The Weekend’ is as good a soundtrack as any. If you’re doing something a little less taxing – sitting on the bus or the tube, say – then the odds are you’ll find it wanting.

The problem with laying into Calvin Harris for lacking substance is that he’s never pretended to be aiming for musical nirvana. No-one buys a Harris album expecting some textured opus. What Joe Public wants from Ready For The Weekend is a meaty slab of Legoland electro - the sort of paint by numbers dance music that feels as though it could have been composed on a high school keyboard using a random collection of preset demos. In fact, Harris originally burst to fame two years ago because he’d basically done exactly that – sat in his bedroom, learned to twiddle a few knobs and spilled out I Created Disco – a collection of daft but catchy, sloganeering tracks with just a hint of LCD Soundsystem. … Continue Reading