Electronic Dance Music Grooves

Katy Perry achieved maturation with Prism, the 2013 album anchored on the self-empowerment anthem "Roar" and the club smash "Dark Horse." Considering how "Roar" scored the closing stages of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, it would've seemed like a logical move for Perry to build upon its adult alternative affirmation but she's instead chosen to use "Dark Horse" as a blueprint for Witness, the long-awaited 2017 successor to Prism. Perhaps Perry shifted her approach after "Rise," the "Roar"-alike written for the 2016 Olympics that she also performed at that year's Democratic National Convention, failed to crack the Top Ten, perhaps she always planned to construct this album with electronic beats and synths, but Witness is so slick with synths it seems slippery.

The Brighton Port Authority is yet one more way that Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim, aka Beats International) has found to gather world-class musical weirdos around him and collaborate with them on the creation of funky, hooky, wave-your-hands-in-the-air dance pop. Unlike his other projects, though, this one apparently stretches way back into the 1970s, when many of the rough tracks on this collection were originally recorded. Over the years, Cook and his collaborator Simon Thornton worked with such disparate singers and songwriters as Iggy Pop, Martha Wainwright, David Byrne and Pete York, and though a good amount of this material was clearly added in much more recently (Dizzee Rascal's contribution to "Toe Jam," for example, is clearly not of 1970s vintage, nor does Iggy Pop sound like the young man he would have been back then), there's a sense of anarchic fun to the proceedings that is very much reminiscent of the best music of the '70s and '80s.

"Swiss group Klaus Johann Grobe have been at it since 2012, and as they prepare to release their third album "Du Bist So Symmetrisch" (and third on Trouble In Mind), the group continues to defy description & blur the lines between electronic pop, dance music, synthesis & kosmische.

All through her career, it has been impossible to divorce Madonna's music from her image, as they feed off each other to the point where it's hard to tell which came first, the concept or the songs. Glancing at the aggressively ugly cover to Hard Candy – its blistering pinks and assaultive leather suggesting cheap bottom-barrel porno – it's hard not to wish that this is the one time Madge broke from tradition, offering music that wasn't quite as garish as her graphics…

The Manchester, England-based trio M People scored in 1994 with a series of British Top Ten hits from its debut album Elegant Slumming; both "Moving on Up" and "One Night in Heaven" became U.S. dance club smashes, thanks to an endearing mixture of house and R&B, and Heather Small's startling vocal presence. Fortunately, M People did not suffer the dreaded sophomore slump; the 1995 release Bizarre Fruit continues in much the same vein as its predecessor. Bizarre Fruit is chock-full of funky house grooves, and Small's deep, soulful vocals add just the right touch to the mix, making M People considerably warmer than most contemporary dance acts.