It doesn't pay to go through life thinking you're too hip for Duran Duran. I was reaquainted with this fact when I recently got around to buying their latest album and realized I could have been listening to the title track daily for the last ten months if I had my music-buying priorities straight. Besides being probably the most straight-up enjoyable song I've heard this year, it's also the most quintessentially Duran Duran-y song released in the last 15 years: brash, arty, stuffed with every synth-and-harmonizing trick in the book, yet tinged with more than a little nostalgia, as befitting a band still going 30 years on, its regular members shifting in and out of the lineup like patrons in and out of their favourite pub. Duran Duran are a singles band and the important thing is that they get the single right, which they definitely do. The rest of the album holds up just fine against 2007's Timberlake/Timbaland collaboration Red Carpet Massacre, with roughly the same ratio of good stuff to tosh. "If You Leave a Light On" is an excellent of "Save a Prayer", with better production, while "The Man Who Stole a Leopard" is funny and weird in exactly the Rio-esque way that the band and Mark Ronson say they were going for. The fact is Duran Duran will never make a "great" record; they love their trash and offer up great heaps of it (the official CD version of AYKIN is fourteen songs long) knowing that somebody somewhere is going to enjoy it, and everybody who wants to will enjoy at least something. The junk is a small price to pay for the gold.
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