Blue – Dani (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I’ve long been an advocate of modern pop becoming influenced by older and more alternative dream-pop forces. Keep the production values and infectiousness of the modern sound but soften its edges and haze things out a bit with those sonic dreaming spires and ethereality that the likes of Kate Bush and a whole host of more underground eighties acts worked with so well. Do that and you have a sound which has the ability to be both commercial and cultish, cool enough for the discerning pop fan and addictive enough to pick up the commercial pop dollar.

It seems that Dani knows this only too well as Blue is almost a blueprint in just how to do this. She blends confident and sultry dance grooves with sumptuous vocals and the result is exactly this new form of pop I am trying to describe. Given her background, growing up in Singapore before heading to London to pursue her career in music, maybe there is something of that culture beating at the heart of the song. A quest for inner peace and tranquility, of stillness and almost mediative quality wrapped in the broader and more vibrant sonics of very western musical structures. The result is wonderfully atmospheric pop which seems to mix the best of both worlds, a heady blend of eastern dreams and western directness and a whole new way of making pop music.