When Mike Silver (aka Midnight Mike) burst onto the underground back in 2002 with the mighty fine, off-kilter electro-pop of 'Round & Around', a lot of the right people saw quite a bit of promise in the guy, me included. He followed that up with a succession of fantastic remixes (most notably for Coloursound's 'Fly With Me' and Playgroup's 'Make It Happen') and continued to impress with his own productions for Flesh and Gomma. It's with a heavy heart that I announce his debut album an almost irretrievable failure.
That it's taken five years for him to pull his finger out and release a full-length is bad enough, but that said debut turns out to be a collection of lazy covers, masquerading as a karaoke party album. The only people having any fun here are the singers as, barring a couple notable exceptions, the versions veer between cringeworthy and just plain pointless.
There are irony-soaked trudges through the likes of 'Money For Nothing', 'Boys (Summertime Love)' (yes, the Sabrina europop number) and 'Tip-Toe Through The Tulips' that border on unlistenable, especially the Dire Straits cover as no matter how sardonically Juice Windscreen delivers the words "faggot" and "homo", it still sounds offensive.
Points are gained for the louche, loungey take on Bo Diddley's 'Who Do You Love?' and the genuinely heartfelt rendition of Roxy's 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache' (by Mike himself), but the rest is just dross that anyone who buys would have every right to feel soundly cheated by. Avoid.
http://www.highvoltage.org.uk/displaydemoreview.asp?num=3209&band=2021
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