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Cerulean is a confusing business. It is billed as Danny L Harle’s debut album, which it definitely isn’t – his actual debut album, Harlecore, came out in 2021, although in at least one sense, Cerulean is markedly different from its predecessor. It’s the weighty guestlist, featuring Clairo, Caroline Polachek, PinkPantheress, MNEK and more, a reflection of Harle’s ascension into the major leagues of pop production: he’s worked with Polachek before, as well as Florence + the Machine and Dua Lipa (who also features on Cerulean), among others.
But in another way, it’s markedly similar. As with Harlecore, its chief source material is the kind of pop-trance big on BBC Radio 1 in the early 00s and the speedy, cheesy, Eurodance music on which the wildly successful Clubland brand was founded in the same era. This it presents with high seriousness. “This album is my message,” offers Harle in the accompanying blurb. “I hope it is received.” A press release suggests that he is drawing on “a particular strain of Italian artistry that encompasses the Renaissance composer Monteverdi and the Y2K club bangers of Eiffel 65”.
It has to be said that the impact of the authors of Blue (Da Ba Dee) is more noticeable than that of Monteverdi on an album that contains tracks called Laa, Te Re Re and Island (Da Da Da). It also has to be said that if you start talking about the artistic continuum between Monteverdi and Eiffel 65, and indeed the message inherent in Euro pop-trance, you lay yourself open to accusations that you’re smarmily taking the piss. Such a thought also crosses one’s mind when confronted by, say, Laa – which features a hook not unlike that of Sandstorm by Darude, only played on synthesised panpipes – or indeed, Island (Da Da Da), which melds banging trance with the sound of a jaunty accordion.
Alternatively, Harle may be performing an entirely earnest salvage operation on music he genuinely loved during his youth, as suggested by Azimuth, which features a striking vocal courtesy of Polachek and feels like a melding of two distinct hit tropes from twentysomething years ago: the aforementioned pop-trance and the melodramatic gothy hard rock of Evanescence, a cocktail that turns out to sound exactly like a latterday Eurovision entry fielded by a former Soviet republic.
Elsewhere, there are beatless instrumentals both lengthy and interstitial (the closing Teardrop in the Ocean executes a skilful shift from ambience to intensity). A 75-second track involving a vocal by Clairo starts out unaccompanied and ends up backed by cinematic strings, and a track featuring PinkPantheress iss so wilfully plasticky it makes PinkPantheress’s own oeuvre sound like Mahalia Jackson at Newport.
What it doesn’t have is a pop melody or hook as undeniable as that of N-Trance’s Set You Free or Toca’s Miracle by Fragma or Ultrabeat’s Pretty Green Eyes, something built to at least temporarily disarm anyone unconvinced by the fluoro flimsiness of Harle’s influences. It all means that Cerulean’s appeal is likely to be dictated by how fondly you recall them. If you view the days when Cascada, Kelly Llorenna and the Trance Nation compilations bestrode the charts as a nonpareil high point in pop history, fill your boots. For the rest of us, it’s an experience that’s sugary and intense, the kind that may cause you to involuntarily grit your teeth.
