Watch Me Dance

Looking back, it’s startling to see how so many early profiles of the Toddla T mentioned the Arctic Monkeys. The logic was that both came from Sheffield and represented two, divergent strains of influence: Guitars v sequencers, with young Turk Toddla presenting the new wave of electronic producers with the mainstream on their minds. Of course, those guys wielding cracked copies of Ableton, talking in bald terms about gut-level bass, didn’t come out of nowhere - they were, to paraphrase another band from Sheffield, already producing your records, messing up the underground you chose together. Toddla T just knew that debut Skanky Skanky’s rightful place was the big time. He even parodied the Arctic Monkeys album cover to make sure you knew too.

Two years later the pop landscape is strewn with bass-driven electronic acts, from Katy B and Magnetic Man to Hudson Mohawke collaborating with Tinie Tempah. It makes sense then that the follow-up to Skanky Skanky is even more brash, even more pop-informed than its predecessor. Sure, it knows it isn’t exactly clever but that it is quite big.

Watch Me Dance takes the clearest route possible to your pleasure receptors by using huge hooks, well-produced beats and a healthy dollop of guest collaborators. Opener ‘Watch Me Dance’ once again calls upon the talents of Roots Manuva, his deadpan baritone leading us through a thicket of glassy, pointed synths and the kind of cluttered, airless production that Basement Jaxx made their name with. “Can we take it back to how it used to be baby?” sings Shola Ama on ‘Take Me Back’; a sanitised breakbreat spine flexing beneath fistfuls of oldschool piano chords approximates the bittersweet euphoria of hardcore so well it suggests you jolly well can. ‘Cherry Picking’ sees Roisin Murphy’s skewed vocals finding kinship with the staccato beats and warm, smothering synth pads. The effect is at once warm and dissonant like grit in the lubricant to keep things interesting.

Of course, this being Toddla T, the weighted grooves and rough edges of Jamaican sound systems survive intact. In fact, ‘Streets So Warm’ possesses a hard, synthetic edge - particularly within its squalls of synth - that’s reminiscent of The Bug. The political message is, to its credit, played completely straight. The same can’t be said of ‘Badman Flu’, a puerile piss-take of aggressive dancehall that would probably be too naff for Major Lazer, an act with whom Toddla T shares considerable DNA. It will almost certainly have you crying nostalgic tears for the white boy rice n’ pea skits of Skanky Skanky.

Yet, Watch Me Dance is a record that hits more often than it misses. There’s no doubt that Toddla T knows his way around a pop melody - note the instrumental outro of 'Fly', a sun-baked reggae cut that Santigold would give her bulging contact book for - but he’s also a master of form as well. Take the sparse, ricocheting pop and clack of ‘Body Good’, proof, if needed that Toddla T can do restraint, should he put his mind to it. Even so, this isn’t a record to be dissected. It’s there to be enjoyed, preferably on a Saturday night, and if you want to analyse that is dickish. Ultimately Watch Me Dance manages to be that rare thing: a party record that isn’t shit when your sober. In fact, it workably satisfies the current hunger for blue chip, balls out dance pop. An appetite, lest we forget, Toddla T helped create in the first place.