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Label: Interscope - Rating:
The Space Cowboy’s album, Digital Rock Star is designed to get your booty shaking on the dance floor. The album is a mix of dance floor anthems, and the Space Cowboy sound teeters between the acid-fueled rave heyday of the early 1990s, and the ubiquitous Hollywood club thump-thump-thump, with a splash of auto-tuned boy-band melodies for good measure. The female singer on most tracks, Chelsea Korka from The Paradiso Girls, soars above the electronic blitz as an earthy and seductive contrast, giving the album a blast of sexy soul. It’s Korka who makes the songs fun to listen to, even when they’ve been stuck in your head for hours on end. This is the album you need when you’re getting pumped up to go to the club to totally erase your memories and get lost in the sea of sweaty bodies on the dance floor.
The standout tracks are “I Came 2 Party”, “Talking In Your Sleep”, “I Want You Back”, “Egyptian Lover”, and the “Falling Down” remix. Space Cowboys manage to make every track deliciously different from the last, just when you thought they couldn’t bring any more life to the constant pound of the synth-driven beats. “I Came 2 Party” is still stuck in my head with its repetitive, bouncy lock-step beats and its lyrics that struck me as sweet – “I came to party, you came to party, so why can’t we party together” is a refreshing change from the overwrought “Let’s go jump in bed - now,” sentiment so often heard today.
“Talking In Your Sleep” has a distinctive 80’s dance rock vibe with guitars so cleverly layered in, you can’t tell if they’re real or from the Casio. “I Want You Back” is the pulsating, up-tempo club rager, with lyrics custom-made for remembering, in a grainy video montage format, all your old lovers. “Egyptian Lover” incorporates the expected middle-eastern sounds over Nadia Oh’s rap seamlessly over driving beats, and the “Falling Down” remix features a smooth male vocal that complements Korka’s voice perfectly, and makes you wish this male vocal appeared elsewhere in the album. The new vocals give a hint of the creative potential of experimentation and innovation Space Cowboy has. And if Digital Rock Star is any indication, whatever experimental turn Space Cowboy takes, it’s all destined to be the new dance-club hit.
Like Space Cowboy? Check out: Mindless Self Indulgence, Cinema Bizarre, The Paradiso Girls
