Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 16/04/07
Label: SonyBMG

Now that the age of the superstar DJ is well and truly over - Pacha and other quaint, Brit-rave outposts aside - that former perennial backroom boy, the producer has stepped centre stage. It's an odd phenomenon, but entirely reasonable when you consider the part desk masters like Timbaland, Pharrell, Swiss Beatz, Kanye West and the rest have played in moulding well, pretty much everyone in the hip hop/R&B pantheon, with their knob-twiddling tentacles daily reaching ever deeper and more determinedly into chart pop territory.

Producers ploughing the indie dance furrow keep a far lower profile, the last UK DJ/producer to really blow both expectations and speakers being Richard X, although his mash-ups were so widely mimicked that the power of the originals quickly evaporated. London-born New York resident Mark Ronson is the newest kid on the block, although he's been around for a while; he delivered his debut in 2003, performed the production honours on Robbie Williams' (grisly) "Rudebox" album and is responsible for most of both Lily Allen's debut and Amy Winehouse's second LP.

"Version", then is - as the title suggests - a collection of interpretive covers rather than remixes and the buzz about the supposedly post-modern pizzazz of Ronson's second effort has been building for months. For no good reason, as it turns out. Despite its wealth of talented guests - Mlles Allen and Winehouse and the late Ol' Dirty Bastard among them - the album is disappointingly short on spark, spunkiness and style, relying instead on novelty for impact. Making maximum use of (entirely capable) retro soulsters The Dap Kings, Ronson gives almost every track the Stax/'70s Motown treatment and this uniformity is the album's main problem.

Rather than letting each individual tune suggest interpretative possibilities, "Version" (as the singular noun implies), imposes a blanket aesthetic and it's a blanket that becomes heavier and more utilitarian as the LP progresses. The Smiths' terrific "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" (which segues into Dozier & Holland's "You Keep Me Hangin' On") is perhaps the strongest track here, although singer Santo Gold enlivens a brass-skronked, neo-baggy take on The Jam's "Pretty Green" and Ms Winehouse's insouciant rasp is always welcome.

Who in Lucifer's name, though, wants to hear Robbie Williams' weedy wittering on "The Only One I Know"? What might brass squawks add to Radiohead's "Just", aside from inappropriate novelty? Since when did The Zutons' clunky pub anthem "Valerie" become a "modern classic" worthy of reappraisal? More importantly, why the hell is Ronson being applauded as a wunderkind for basically recycling big beat and hiring some horns? If this is what's currently floating the boats New York's hipsters, they're frankly welcome to him.

    by Sharon O'Connell