A quick glance at the album credits for Forget the World and you can see Afrojack’s intentions for his big debut. Taking lessons from Guetta’s Nothing But The Beat and Calvin Harris’s dance-pop phenomenon 18 Months, Afrojack has enlisted a plethora of big names to create what he no doubt hoped to be an EDM cash-cow. The only thing Van de Wall didn’t learn from Guetta and Harris was how to be any good.
The album contains an abundance of almost too accesible EDM ‘bangers’, all of them ready to disappear into the ether and to be forgotten about in a matter of days. The formula remains rock solid for the majority of the album. You can almost predict when the meaningless lyrics whining over the same old minor chords come in and there’s nothing you haven’t heard before in Afrojack’s same old wonky melodies.
And the lyrics. The word ‘irony’ doesn’t seem to cut it with the Van de Wall camp. You can expect insightful lines such as ‘Fuck that fake shit it’s time to get real,’ in the pop-trap infused Dynamite featuring Snoop Dogg. It begs the question that if this huge mega-bucks investment isn’t ‘fake’ then what is?
Even worse is Sting’s effort on Catch Tomorrow, where he sings about homeless people with po-faced blissful ignorance. Yeah, I’m sure the people at Hakkasan are SO concerned about the homeless people ‘roaming Sunset Boulevard’. On the track Mexico, Shirazi sings about how, ‘He’ll be in the land of the free… (because) nobody there’s guilty.’ Well after one quick blitz through this album you can write a pretty convincing list of who is to blame for this debauchery.
But I can warn you advance, do not listen to Three Strikes. It has the most atrocious riff I’ve ever heard in an EDM track and I have no idea what the message is. Would you really let someone mess you around and give them 3 chances? I certainly won’t be applying that ridculous logic to this album.
However, the best tracks on the album are Too Wild and Mexico. Due to the grace of God, the songs opt for a more softer vibe, with Mexico featuring no ‘drop’ whatsoever. Clearly Afrojack was worried that the structure of the album was not varied or diverse enough. Perhaps he wasn’t worried enough.
Get it on iTunes