Island
Pop, 2013

Swedish DJ Avicii finally puts out his own album, and some folks are already calling him a sellout.  If selling out means “making music for camera and insurance commercials”, I think I’m inclined to agree with those accusations.

Sure, songs like Wake Me Up, with its fusion of country and EDM, and it introduces vocalist Aloe Blacc to the world, but both it and its sequel Hey Brother would fit very well in some Samsung commercial. You know, the one with some model posing artfully with a smartphone and claiming that everyone’s due to wake up the brothers or something. Or a model sending selfies to her legion of fans to the tune of Lay Me Down as some voice over swears that having a smartphone would make my world a more beautiful place. Or some guy with an artful five o’clock shadow snapping photos of kids in third world country while Addicted to You plays in the background – yes, people, buy a Nikon today.

The songs here are all designed to get everyone to dance, and their appeal diminishes considerably when one is sober and not in the mood to run on a treadmill. Apart from Wake Me Up and Hey Brother, most of the songs here are very similar, with dance beats and bass lines that come together in one big blur after a while. True is definitely something meant for a certain demographic that I am not a part of!