Erlend Øye made his name with Kings Of Convenience, a duo born from a pastoral Nick Drake fantasy, but his folky ditherings have always been brushed by an air of cosmopolitan cool. While his band was making wooden albums like Quiet Is The New Loud, Øye was tooling around with electronic artists like Röyksopp, Four Tet, and Metro Area's Morgan Geist on the side. Pairing his folky voice to the lustrous gleam of dance music gives a charge to DJ-Kicks, a comely "singing DJ mix" on which Øye hums over club tracks that thwack and skitter beneath him.
Keeping a keen eye on the microhouse and electro sounds that mark nights out from New York to Cologne to his home country of Norway, Øye gathers a bunch of drink-clinking anthems into a homey whole. Opening with Jürgen Paape's "So Weit Wie Noch Nie," a percolating ode from the German label Kompakt, the disc transitions between tracks with a cappella interludes that set moody shifts in tone. Øye's vocal-parroting intro to Phoenix's "If I Ever Feel Better" would likely make Sofia Coppola melt, while Alan Braxe & Fred Falke's French-house banger "Rubicon" sets the club lights in motion. Some of Øye's selections are dicey—Avenue D's "2D2F," with its "don't get too drunk to fuck" chorus, represents electroclash at its cloying worst—but DJ-Kicks draws a smart line through dance music's interrelated movements. The Rapture's "I Need Your Love" signals rock-land's current groove fancy, while tracks by the likes of Jackmate and Ricardo Villalobos bristle and buck outside techno's stark lines.
The album's key moment arrives in a heavy reworking of Röyksopp's "Poor Leno," when Øye croons The Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" over a black-on-the-inside bassline left to brood over finger-snap cymbals. Øye sounds like a night owl shuffling around in headphones at home, doing private karaoke over social records that beg for a little alone time.