On
Timeflies' fourth studio album, 2015's aptly titled
Just for Fun, the Boston duo of producer/programmer Rob "Rez" Resnick and vocalist Cal Shapiro remain perennial party bros, the
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck of EDM, forever up in tha club looking for girls to conversate and new words to rhyme with their favorite drink of choice. On 2014's surprisingly sturdy
After Hours, the group's poison was champagne; this time out, they're posting up with "Prosecco." Much more than a dry white Italian wine, in Resnick and Shapiro's adept, AXE Body Spray-soaked hands it becomes both an advertising slogan and saucy metaphor, as Shapiro softly coos, "Maybe we should change the view, so I can sip on you, while we're sipping Prosecco." It's the kind of scene-setting product placement, set to an infuriatingly catchy hook, that marks
Timeflies as both total douches and canny songwriters, capable of packaging a fantasy dance-club lifestyle into one song as deftly as
the Eagles did touring in the '70s. Only these guys aren't about taking it easy. Instead, they 'bout to "Burn It Down," with Shapiro rapping defiantly over a synthy, hip-hop baritone sax that, unlike
Billy Joel, "We don't care who started the fire/We don't care who sparked the flame." That he also name-drops both Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen prior to the song's first chorus, turning their names into verbs ("She, Alex Trebeking me questions!"), is both stupid and thrilling. In fact, stupid and thrilling is a pretty succinct way to describe much of
Just for Fun, which takes you on a club crawl from cheeky
Maroon 5-style R&B ("Undress Rehearsal") to bubbly, Motown-meets-
Jay-Z hip-hop soul ("Worse Things Than Love") to uber-romantic,
Avicii-esque four-on-the-floor dance anthems ("Time Machine") without ever breaking a sweat. ~ Matt Collar