Amazon.co.uk Review
Alex Gopher's debut is full of late-night house music in the images of smoochy jazz, Prince-styled funk and the romantic airs of 1990s revisionist disco. The most immediate tracks are party pleasers with butt-oriented beats and strident vocals demanding that you get down and get with it. Elsewhere Gopher is more considered--even melancholy--sampling Billie Holliday on "The Child" or collaborating with AIR for the intimate alt. ballad "Ralph and Katy" (a swooning track with poetic vocoderisms and fragile airs). Much of the album shows Gopher's credentials as doyen of the French house movement--like Bob Sinclair or AIR (both of whom debuted on the Solid imprint co-founded by Gopher), he makes a version of house/electronica that is metropolitan and urbane. He also holds a warm nostalgia for the lost world of Studio 54 and remakes disco as a luxurious modern music--a winning approach.
--Tony Marcus
From Amazon.com
As a French DJ, Alex Gopher faces inevitable comparisons to Daft Punk, France's principal exporter of urbane electronic disco. While the comparison is not unjust,
YouMyBaby&I inclines more towards organic, sweaty funk than the robotic metronome beats of France's other prodigal sons. Though he is too mannered to indulge in the raucous hip-hop inflections of American electronica icons such as Fatboy Slim, Gopher is nonetheless in hot pursuit of your booty and your libido. This is most obvious on "Party People," a full-on international funk rave-up that is already a dance-floor staple in European clubs. Most of the album, however, is post-rave material. For those that left the rave with a new friend and are looking for seduction aids, there is "The Child," with its insistent bass line and sultry, suggestive vocal sample from jazz great Bessie Smith; for those that left still buzzing and are looking to ease reentry, there is the spacey, hypnotic "Ralph and Kathy," in which a vocoder-voiced astronaut laments, "I have lost control of the shuttle, all the stars are the same," only to be comforted by a soothing female computer. This album is for those who party like Francophones--it's suave, hip, and restrained, but still a slave to the funk.
--David Roberts
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