Day 46: Todd Terje – It’s Album Time
Album cover courtesy of Olsen Records
I am toeing a very fine line today. My plan was to have another disco shower, but I’ve also had two glasses of wine. It needed to be an album that’s good, but not so good that I forget where I am and throw shapes so hard that I slip and fall on the conditioner-slicked floors. I settled on Todd Terje’s delightfully named It’s Album Time. I was semi-sure I’d heard at least a few of the songs so I figured I probably wouldn’t get too carried away.
Todd Terje is a Norwegian DJ and producer who probably would fall most neatly under the category of nu-disco. It seems like it was album time for him in 2014 and album time stopped after that, as It’s Album Time is his only full-length studio album to date. But he is still playing live, and he’s also collaborated with Franz Ferdinand and co-written the song “Candy” with Robbie Williams.
Sidenote, there’s been a very surprising amount of Robbie Williams in my life recently. Ever since I album-a-dayed Rudebox, it seems like he’s cropping up everywhere. I just saw a video of him explaining to Julia Roberts that she inspired him to take a prostitute shopping. Robbie Williams seems to be my latest manifestation of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, because I could swear he wasn’t this all-encompassing a few weeks ago — everywhere I look, there’s Robbie Williams. I’m not complaining though, love a bit of Robbie.
The first half of It’s Album Time is a good shower soundtrack. Nice, repetitive, mellow but jolly enough to make me scrub myself with newfangled vigour. Terje also seems like a fun guy: he was told by a Norwegian radio exec that they don’t want to play his song “Inspector Norse” because it sounds like background music for a beach bar, so he made a song called “Strandbar”, which means beach bar.
There’s nothing too crazy in the first half of the album, but it really picks up in the second half. A definite high point for me was the version of Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary”, sung by Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry. It’s slow, beautiful and atmospheric, sounding like it could be on the soundtrack of really any David Lynch project. Pretty much every song from that point on is very good, ending with the modern classic, “Inspector Norse”. I loved “Swing Star, Pt. 1”.
It started off as maybe a nice, casual 7.5, but the second half of the album bumped it up a whole lot. It’s an 8.5/10. There’s an absolute top-tier run of songs at the end. I foresee more album time for me in the future.