★★★☆☆
Best known for the David Guetta mash-up “Love Don’t Let Me Go,” The Egg crack a classic case of finding a groove and getting comfortable with it, to the point of leaving it with a butt imprint. The indie-for-the-dance-set and vice versa gets its cheeks warm after a particularly exciting start as well; after the inviting electro-house/pop “Catch” and “A Bit” being dominated by everyman surrealism, they then come to rest on a hyper-polished punk-funk sound interlinked to resonant relaxation and retro posturing big enough to fire up festivals at will by coasting into a surge.
“In Your Pocket” induces a big chill on its way to a bracing flowering up of Brit-pop, that goes on to hug the title track and “Over There”, whose vocal gets baggier and baggier where the dance-rock goes backwards in time (maybe a reflection of The Egg’s large gaps between LPs in the past). “Stars” threatens to take a Muse-style space-rock jangle, and “Keep It Simple Stupid” gets the album back on a less dreamy, more alert footing. All are variations on paper, but are inextricably linked back to the same, one-paced widescreen nucleus; and on an album ten tracks long, that doesn’t represent good value, instead denoting one good idea The Egg try to stretch for all its worth.
File under: Digitalism, The Presets, Dirty Vegas