Everything and the kitchen sink
For his first album of original material, DJ/producer Mark Ronson has added a new element to the mix: his voice. He gamely takes the lead on the fame-ruminating, pop/hip-hop mélange of “Lost It (In The End),” and while most definitely Auto-Tuned, he isn’t half bad. Ronson’s strength has always been in surrounding himself with like-minded artists, both burgeoning and established, and that’s largely true on Record Collection, a typically ambitious if uneven effort. Every track aims to be an anthem (even the Q-Tip enhanced “Bang Bang Bang,” a riff on the French nursery rhyme “Alouette”), but several fall short. The velvet-voiced D’Angelo summons his best Cee-Lo impression on “Glass Mountain Trust,” and the garish stunt-casting of Boy George on “Somebody to Love Me” nearly overshadows the slick performance by Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt. But the album’s best songs, like the bewitching would-be lullaby “The Night Last Night,” demand repeat listens.