American listeners may not know the name (or they may confuse it with that of the late glam guitar icon Mick), but Mark Ronson was the producer behind one of the hottest musical messes of the last decade, Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album, not to mention albums and tracks by an impressive cross-genre pantheon of artists as disparate as pop diva Christina Aguilera, British rockers Kaiser Chiefs, and rapper Wale. His signature sound rejected Autotune and all sorts of other sonic CGI in favor of gritty R&B horn sections (no samples please), real life drum sets, and actual singing. The results could be thrilling, but they could also come off sounding unbecomingly gimmicky – a hazard underlined by his 2007 collection of covers called Version. Though that record did yield his biggest hit yet – a cover of the Smiths’ classic “Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before” with Daniel Merriweather on vocals – it was not without a few spectacular duds, like his tedious take on Radiohead’s “Just”, which could only have been worse if he’d recruited Paul Anka or Pat Boone to deliver it.
For his latest album called Record Collection, he’s billing himself as Mark Ronson and the Business Intl. The record’s first single features guest rapper Q-Tip and singer Amanda Warner of the California techno-pop duo MNDR – it’s called “Bang Bang Bang” and re-embraces electronics, albeit in a similarly retro way, building a sleak 80s-inspired sci-fi dance epic out of the disassembled bits of the French children’s song “Alouette”. While as a producer Ronson has been storming the U.S. charts for the last ten years, he hasn’t had an American hit in his own right. This song, as groovy as it is (seriously, it’s been ages since Q-Tip has been this much fun) isn’t likely to change that. But it’s already a Top 10 hit overseas.
