![]() ![]() Ultimately, it's that sense of love and good vibes that drives much of Automaton. There are few bands who play classic disco-funk with as much genuine love for the genre and care in the productions as Kay and Jamiroquai. Also infectious are tracks like the Rick James does '70s Europop number "Hot Property" and the humid disco anthem "Summer Girl," replete with a chorus of female backing singers. With Kay's lithe croon at the center, cuts like the aforementioned "Cloud 9" and the steamy "Something About You'' are black-light dancefloor bangers full of pulsing synths, icicle-crisp guitars, and the occasional goosebump-inducing orchestral string flourish. In that sense, Automaton fits nicely alongside similarly inclined works like Daft Punk's own Moroder homage Random Access Memories and Two Door Cinema Club's Gameshow. Which means that, while the album plays well with the disco end of their output (think "Little L" or "Cosmic Girl"), fans of the group's more organic, analog funk end may come away feeling somewhat compressed. The watch is presented on a dark green rolled-edge alligator leather strap and secured to the wrist with a gold folding buckle. While previous outings found Jamiroquai evincing Moroder's slick robo-funk, Automaton is the closest they've come to making an outright Moroder-style album. The Magic Lotus automaton comes in a 43mm case available in a choice of red or white gold, in limited editions of 28 pieces each. Helping Kay conjure the funk magic this time is longtime keyboardist Matt Johnson, who co-produced and co-wrote much of the album. To those ends, Automaton works quite well, finding Kay in fluid vocal form and living up to his image as a global, time-traveling, playboy magic-man. Here, we get several catchy club-ready singles ("Automaton" and "Cloud 9") front-loaded with a handful of pleasant, often inventive album tracks designed less to rock the charts than for Kay to rock the European tour circuit. Which is to say, this is pretty much the same album Kay has been making since at least 2001's A Funk Odyssey. More broadly, the album also fits into Kay's fascination with the effect technology has both positively and negatively on our lives and on the planet (i.e., 1993's "Emergency on Planet Earth" and 1996's "Virtual Insanity"). As the title implies, Jamiroquai's eighth studio album, 2017's Automaton, is a dancefloor-friendly production inspired as much by lead singer Jay Kay's famous love of sports cars as Giorgio Moroder's synth and drum machine-heavy productions of the '70s and '80s.
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