Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 07/05/07
Label: Columbia

Some acts whip-up a frenzy of anticipation and excitement without even trying. Groove Armada are not one of them. Always more anonymous dance duo than superstar DJs, their return has never been 'long awaited'. Yet suddenly, their fifth album, "Soundboy Rock", has a tangible buzz of expectation about it, as if the two geeks with nice tunes turned into a genuine main event while no one was looking and this is their 'big' album.

It's a feeling more than a provable fact. A suspicion based on very little - it's not like the album's been heralded by a blockbuster hit. Indeed, Tom Findlay and Andy Cato's newly acquired status as something to get excited about is less to do with them and more about the state of music. The fortunes of dance and pop are once again interdependent - this time under the style conscious "New Rave" banner - and there's an opening for imaginative, synth-loving elders with club credibility and chart know-how to help mould this new generation. Which suddenly makes Groove Armada prime contenders.

That's the theory, anyway. Ten years after "At The River" floated them on to the coffee table, Groove Armada have finally come into their own. But is "Soundboy Rock" really the album to redefine pop and revitalise the dance-floor? No, not really. But that doesn't stop it being amazing in every sense of the word.

"Soundboy Rock" really is all things to all people, and most of it good. As eclectic as the line-up of one of their Lovebox Weekender festivals, it touches out-and-out throwaway pop ecstasy and sinks deep into rudeboy ramblings. It gleefully gets hepped-up and off its face on 2D bleeps, then slouches into glistening R&B. It's exhilarating, mindless and soulful and miraculously never once sounds like the horrendous car crash of styles that it is.

From "Get Up"'s whoomp-whoomp booty bounce, to the retro body-poppin' club funk of "The Things That We Could Share"; "Save My Soul"'s dawn beckoning trance to "What's Your Version?"'s lazy comedown, this careers and stumbles woozily past all of Groove Armada's bases, finding a perfectly formed track at nearly every turn. It's chaos, tied together with quality, integrity and an authentic love of all things clubbing, and by the grace of the disco gods it works.

True, Findlay and Cato's brief history of dance never comes close to reinventing or redefining anything. But with future pop classics "The Girls Say" and "Song 4 Mutya (Out Of Control)", featuring ex-Sugababe Mutya Buena, both sounding like forgotten Prince masterpieces - and with a host of Parisian chic, Chicago house and Ibizan sunsets to match - "Soundboy Rock" is truly an album worth getting excited about.

    by Dan Gennoe