The only real criticism is the album losses it way a bit towards the end, with none of the final tracks managing to serve up the same sort of excitement as some of the album’s earlier cuts. Highlight include the propulsive chintz of ‘Super Fresh’, which just needs to be the next single, there’s over-the-top proto-boogie on ‘Hot Property’ and a stripped back crooner in the form of ‘Nights Out In The Jungle’, though the latter’s faux rapping and scratching at the midway point just sounds a bit old-hat these days. There’s actually very few weak songs, sure many of them don’t quite hit the heights of classics like ‘Canned Heat’ & and ‘Cosmic Girl’, but that was probably never on the cards. But they’re also furnished with plenty of modern production flourishes that give each track - like ‘Shake It On’ and ‘Dr Buzz’, with its arpeggiated hooks and sculptured kicks - a more modern-sounding veneer that acts as a nice counter to Jay Kay’s classic delivery. Almost all the tracks feature stodgy disco basslines, chatty percussion and Jay Kay in full falsetto mode alongside plenty of Chic-esque backing vocals. Truth be told, ‘Automaton’ falls somewhere in between the two. But then there’s ‘Cloud 9’, the album’s second release, and that’s more of a classic Jamiroquai cut a starry-eyed slice of pumping disco that pointed to an album that would be more in keeping with the group’s previous output. And in some respects that’s true, the album’s title track ‘Automaton’ is a hulking slab of mechanical disco with nods to electro and synth wave, but with a strong disco DNA bubbling just below the surface. It seemed, on the face of it, then like the group was forgoing live instrumentation for a more synth-based aesthetic. When the album’s first track was unveiled earlier this year it sounded like the group, fronted by Jay Kay, had abandoned its acid-jazz, disco boogie aesthetic for something a bit more mechanical-sounding and fresher. Jamiroquai’s new album ‘Automaton’ is the comeback album fans have been waiting for.
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