Fans of The Devil Wears Prada will remember Miranda Priestly’s tirade about cerulean blue and that colour’s important influence on fashion from Yves Saint Laurent to the clearance bins of a budget shop: “That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs.”
So, perhaps it’s unsurprising that one of the pivotal members of PC music, whose influence has trickled down through pop music and no doubt made “millions of dollars and countless jobs” for the genre, has named his latest album after that same shade of blue.
Cerulean is the follow up to his 2021 album Harlecore and is fuelled by his years of production work from his PC Music days to his breakthrough to “the mainstream”. With Harlecore, Harle traversed the cusps of rave music and pop, leaning far more into the donk, the trance, the gabba elements of it all. With Cerulean, Harle’s alter egos of DJ Danny, DJ Ocean, DJ Mayhem and MC Boing are replaced by the alt-pop Avengers: Caroline Polachek, Clairo, Oklou and PinkPantheress, allowing Harle to delve more into the pop-side of the harsher edges of dance music, areas Harlecore shied away from.
Take the stellar single ‘Starlight’, with an anthem-worthy hook within the industrial crunch of Harle’s production, the track relentlessly builds until the explosion of pure oomph in the final minute. Similarly, ‘Azimuth’ has a catchy chorus with a grandiose trance-afflicted production underneath it, glazed with Polachek’s glorious harmonising in the back of the mix.
Then there are the ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’s of the record. The three track run of ‘Island (da da da)’, ‘Te Re Re’ and ‘Laa’ marks the clear influences of eurodance of the 2000s. ‘Island (da da da)’, featuring Harle’s clearly talented eldest daughter, has an accordion lead which is eerily reminiscent of the 2009 hit ‘Stereo Love’ by Edward Maya and Vika Jigulina, a sound that perhaps should’ve been left in the late-00s. ‘On and On’, another track featuring Polachek, also falls victim to the Eiffel 65 influence, with a possible overdose of ‘da da da’s filling the track.
However, amidst the intensity of the rave, there are wonderful moments of classical influence and solitude. ‘Noctiluence’, the opening track, and ‘Teardrop in the Ocean’, the closing track, both include gorgeous orchestral arrangements and operatic textures, whilst ‘O Now Am I Truly Lost’ feels like a robot quartet tried to cover a James Blake Harmonimix, but it works (complete with a cheeky cameo from Harle’s youngest daughter shouting: “It’s music!”).
Perhaps the biggest crime of this album is that ‘Facing Away’ is only a minute and 15 seconds long, shortchanging Clairo’s brilliant vocals. It’s one of the (briefer) highlights of the album alongside Julia Michaels’ performance on ‘Raft in The Sea’ and Dua Lipa’s on ‘Two Hearts’.
In the end, the accompanying audiovisual film probably captures the album’s possible reception: numbers of people dance happily around Harle, while others stand still, looking slightly underwhelmed.
