Artist: Elton John vs. Pnau
Label: Mercury Records
Released: 2012
Length: 28:18
Rating: 4/5
»Good Mornig To The Night« is a barely 28-minute experiment backed by a musical effort of seriously sharp arranging smarts from the Australian electronic duo Pnau. So, to sum up quickly what we’re talking about this time: a reinterpretation of Elton John’s music, given the »hand-crafted« (and reworked«) treatment by Pnau!
Elton John is a big fan of new-wave acts that dive into electronic sound manipulation and have the artful know-how to dose it out with simple rhythmic sampling, which gives them a pop edge. Pnau are among the acts Elton has had »his eye on« for a good while. In fact, Sir Elton John is such a fan of this Australian duo that he gave them full access to the original recordings of the discography the legendary musician put out between 1970 and 1977.
The result is eight intriguing musical stories that neatly manage to fuse different moments of the seventies, pulled from Elton John’s legacy, and pour them into the modern language of how sound is perceived in a new era. Picture tossing a handful of basic motifs from various Elton songs into one and the same pot, adding modern electronic backing enriched with extra sonic loops and special effects. Then go so far as to dunk Elton’s vocal in the kind of production that still sounds sweet and smooth, but is barely recognizable as »Elton-esque«. You take a little, you add a little. The minimalism of short, punchy arranging strokes stays restrained throughout, and this record boasts exceptional listenability and the full-blooded substance of the musical charisma it distills.
Experiments like this usually smash hard into the cold ground of total sobriety, since most are doomed to fail from the get-go. Not this time. This is a successful head-on collision of the seventies and the here and now. And a beautifully balanced one! Meaning that not at a single solitary point on this record do you feel pretentiousness, pushiness, or overkill in how Pnau place the individual building blocks in their arrangements. That’s how eight strikingly successful mashups came about. We might as well call them eight songs. You hear Elton John’s sweet voice, so masterfully poured into the bulk of new-age sound manipulation that this realization alone is a veritable shock therapy of a one-of-a-kind experience, the sort a listener doesn’t get every day.
If I toss out two or three examples of what’s basically going on here, it goes something like this. Opener Good Morning To The Light »borrows« the lead motifs and melodies from Elton’s songs Philadelphia Freedom, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Mona Lisas and Mad Hatter, Tonight, Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding , Gulliver/It’s Hay Chewed, Sixty Years On and Someone Saved My Life Tonight; next, Foreign Fields is a pile of motifs taken from Pinky, Someone Saved My Life Tonight, Chameleon, Cage the Songbird, Sweet Painted Lady, High Flying Bird, and (so I don’t ramble on too long) Black Ice Stare is woven together from You’re So Static, Cold Highway and Solar Prestige a Gammon (the other five puzzles you can crack yourself). The samples of the originals are at times barely recognizable in this colorful mince, and that’s exactly where the record’s greatest charm hides.
»Nu-disco« is what you could call it! No less and no more. The operation of patching up the time fracture was more than a success. Thanks to the finesse and sensitivity of the Pnau geniuses, who dug deep into the dusty archives of the pop giant, rummaged through them sensibly, read them and wove the main ingredients of his signature creations together, then painlessly carried them through their own perception of music into a distinctive product, tailor-made for fans of Elton John and Pnau alike. With an approach like this, it’s not hard to imagine similar makeovers of classic works by the likes of Barry White, Stevie Wonder and more down the line. And rightly so. Only true talents should be handed the goods for such a challenging transformation. Elton John figured, damn rightly, all by himself, that Pnau couldn’t possibly »drop the ball« here.
Lineup
Elton John – vocals, piano
Nick Littlemore – remix
Peter Mayes – remix
Production
Pnau
Tracklist
1. Good Morning To The Night
2. Sad
3. Black Icy Stare
4. Foreign Fields
5. Telegraph to the Afterlife
6. Phoenix
7. Karmatron
8. Sixty
