Juliet Richardson (aka Juliet) spent the past few months opening for 80s pop icons Duran Duran creating a match made in pop heaven. Juliet may have been too young to hit the clubs during the first wave of 80s dance music, but she seems determined to get in on the current revival. Her four track sampler features songs that are both gritty and pretty.
”Waiting” shows off Juliet’s wispy, but still energetic vocals. Backed by techno beats and the sound of crashing ocean waves, track manages to be soothingly seductive and highly danceable at the same time. It’s almost as if Madonna came back from Kabbalah land and returned to her early club roots.
Juliet strikes pure musical gold on the club hit, “Avalon”. At 7:04, the track would be considered an epic when it comes to mainstream radio play, but it’s also a remixers paradise. As Juliet croon’s the hook “We’ll take a holiday”, you can imagine the hip hop artists lining up to sample her Dido-esque voice. No matter how the song gets sampled or mashed or whatever, it’s going to have club goers grooving on the floors late into the night.
Sampler winds down with the moody piece titled “Untitled”. It’s a bit of a downer, coming off the highs to be found in “Avalon” and “Waiting”, but it does offer some solid lyrics. You can almost picture solitary rainy days, as Juliet reminisces about “golden hours with you”. Final track, “Pot of Gold” is the most straightforward of the pack, but also, the least inspired. It’s one of those harmless radio songs, that isn’t good enough to make you bop along when you’re driving or obnoxious enough to have you fumbling to turn the dial.
As long as Juliet keeps on grooving with tunes like “Avalon” and resists making mainstream pop, she’s sure to stand out from the pack. After all, there’s nothing worse, in a musical sense, than being just another face or voice in the crowd. |