Ultra Records: cat. # UL 2082-2
Released October 2009

Track list:*
1. Kaleidoscope (7:36)
2. Escape Me (4:18)
3. You Are My Diamond (4:11)
4. I Will Be Here (3:26)
5. I Am Strong (5:39)
6. Here On Earth (4:56)
7. Always Near (1:34)
8. It's Not The Things You Say (3:15)
9. Fresh Fruit (5:24)
10. Century (4:42)
11. Feel It In My Bones (4:52)
12. Who Wants To Be Alone (4:36)
13. LA Ride (4:13)
14. Bend It Like You Don't Care (3:24)
15. Knock You Out (5:07)
16. Louder Than Boom (4:10)
17. Surrounded By Light (2:40)

*Many of these tracks feature guest vocalists. Idiots.


IN BRIEF: Shit.

I've just put ice cubes in a pint of lager. Yes. I'm beyond the pail of acceptable human conduct. This is the first time any man has combined lager with ice. Cider and ice? Now there's safe ground. But lager? No sir, few would even brave the thought of it. It's just Not The Done Thing. I ran out of cold lager, you see, and the case I found in the garage was room temperature, quite unsuitable for a refined gentleman's palette. But needs must, and so I improvised with the tools at hand. And so, here I am, glass a'clinkin' and...

Eh? Eh? What? Tiësto? Oh, for fu-

Tiësto, then. Old Tiesto. That son of mine, Tiesto. Or not. Do we really have to go through all this again? Really? Who out there, reading this alarmingly disjointed review, is still unclear on this subject? You either think Tiesto is a joke, or you're 15. Or you're high. I'm a bit high right now, and this doesn't actually sound as terrible as it did yesterday, when I was stone-cold sober. But what does that prove? If you're going to get high, put some fucking Pink Floyd on. Don't play Tiesto, of all things. It still doesn't sound good. It just doesn't hurt to listen to anymore.

I have a confession. When I was... oh, 14? When I was 14 I bought Tiësto's first album, In My Memory. Heady days. I bought it, and I thought it was quite fucking sophisticated, as a 14 year old does when confronted by orchestral intros and songs called Battleship Grey, and shit. These days, I'd laugh at such a naive perspective on bombastic attempts at credibility that were written by other people. But I can understand why people too young and inexperienced to know better might believe some of the Tiësto hype, right? That's the moral of that flashback. Empathy, and all that.

Anyway... The difference between me as a 14-year-old and the 14-year-olds of today is that I was listening to a much better album than Kaleidoscope. Not necessarily a good album, but an album with moments that still stand up to my adult self. He concocted a few progressive moments that could be played in proper progressive sets without provoking guffaws. Battleship Grey, despite the name, was actually pretty good, as far as paper-thin trip hop goes. And Suburban Train remains a definitive autumn-hued anthem, euphoria pushing through melancholy and throbbing black bass and cascading over a sea of 14-year-old hands thrust ecstatically into the air.

Kaleidoscope, however, is just rubbish. In the seven years since his debut album, Tiesto has steadily removed any trace of seriousness or integrity and replaced it all with naked money-making, image-spinning cynicism. This is dance music for children. It can't even qualify as pop music, because it's too fist-clenchingly, Jesus-posingly serious to be any fun whatsoever. Play this in a Top 40 club and most of the punters who aren't distracted by the aching urge to fuck another member of the dancefloor will yawn, throw perfunctory shapes and wait for something interesting to come back on. No serious DJ is going to come near any of these tracks. The very notion is laughable.

This is music-as-product, dancefloor euphoria pressed and packaged into plastic commodity manifest. If the superstar DJ trend of the late-90s represented the nadir of dance music's tendency to ferociously capitalise, Tiesto - the ultimate in superstar DJs - is the appropriate totem of dance music geared, tooled and marketed to make the maximum amount of possible money. I don't need to use fucking adjectives. Just go on any website or music channel offering audio samples and hear it for yourself.

The bitter irony is that I'm listening to this for nothing, because Tiesto isn't the pop star he so obviously wants to be. For all his hyperreal DJ Mag placings, advertising campaigns and vacuous lists of world records, he's nowhere near the best-selling electronic musician in the world. On current form, David Guetta absolutely trounces Tiesto's best efforts to cross-over, and the old hats like The Prodigy can still shift more copies than Tiesto's grinning visage can imagine. This is a man whose hyperbolic "Biggest star ever!" image exists solely online and in the gargantuan arena concerts where his web-acolytes gather. You think four billion people actually tuned into the Olympics opening ceremony, you raging fanboys? That's two-thirds of the world's population, including those who can't afford drinking water, let alone a fucking television. I remember that ceremony, because I went out and left it on in the background while my mother did the ironing. Four billion people, my drunken arse. Tiesto is not a superstar, not outside his carefully cultivated echoscape of dimwitted pubescent saps swallowing his marketing boasts hook, line and sinker.

So what's left to say? Do you expect me to explain why I think this album is a bucket of slop? Again: go listen to the samples, the Youtube videos. If you haven't figured it out yet, then nothing I write is going to correct you. You just have terrible taste, it's that simple. Go on: navigate your way from my website in disgust. I'm too fucking intoxicated to even notice. And that's making this album sound better. Just think how acerbic I could be if I were sober now.

This is horribly bad music. It's over-produced, compressed to the point of literal physical pain at high volumes. Of course, that's because it's intended to be ripped and played at 128kps, so you've got to over-amplify just so the MP3 encoding doesn't chop too much off. Every yearning, earnest vocal, every clunky key change and chord shift is an affront. Every ridiculous collaboration (and there are billions of them) is just another attempt to show off Tiesto's "serious artist" credentials or sell more copies on name-association. Every gawky, funkless kick drum is designed not for dancing but for sugar-rush fist pumping at laser-soaked arena gigs.

And I have to fucking listen to it, as if it were real music. It's like having to give a job interview to a labrador dressed in a bespoke pinstripe. No matter how much time or money is invested into the affair, the whole enterprise is fundamentally ludicrous. Tiesto can collaborate with as many people as he wants, hire as many sycophantic studio goons as his credit card will stretch to, and blow as much cash on bombastic TV advertising campaigns as he can manage and this will always be a blatantly shit record. And you don't need me to tell you that.

ACE TRACKS:
Fuck off.


Written by SYSTEM-J for TranceCritic.com. May not be reproduced or republished without the consent of TranceCritic.com. © All rights reserved.

Title: Tiësto - Kaleidoscope
Category: Album
Sub Category: Euro
Reviewer: SYSTEM-J
Related Link: http://www.tiesto.com/
Added: October 10th 2009
Viewed: 4427 Times
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