Sunday, April 19
Album Review: M4TR & AJ Solaris– Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1
AJ Solaris has been doing his thing under the M4TR banner for the better part of a decade — blending new wave, synthpop, disco, and funk into something that doesn't fit neatly into any one box, which is probably the point. Working out of Washington DC, he's quietly racked up 2.7 million streams across 4,000 playlists in 150 countries, and last year's Love Is the Revolution crossed a million on its own. So when it came time to figure out what to do next with that album, he did something pretty reasonable: handed it to two producers who know exactly what a dancefloor wants — and in doing so, found a way to carry his music, and the emotions packed inside it, into corners of the world it hadn't quite reached yet. Those producers are not small names. Philip Larsen — Grammy winner, with credits alongside Kylie Minogue, Erasure, Soft Cell, and OMD — takes four of the five tracks and essentially rebuilds them from scratch, keeping the emotional bones while pushing everything else into club territory. Mr. Mig, who's worked with Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Justin Timberlake, gets one song: Hooks, which he drags gleefully into Ibiza disco-funk and somehow makes it feel like it was always meant to live there. Every track comes in two flavors — radio edit and extended version — which is how you end up with a 10-track album built out of five songs. It makes sense when you think about it: the radio edit is the song that fits into your day and invites to AJ Solaris's party; the extended version is what's waiting on the other side when the party turns out to be so good you stop checking the time.