Dirty Loops - Loopified (2014)

Dirty Loops' full-length debut album, 2014's Loopified, showcases the Swedish trio's ambitious jazz, prog rock, R&B, and electronic dance-inflected pop music. Formed in 2008, Dirty Loops feature the talents of vocalist/keyboardist Jonah Nilsson, bassist Henrik Linder, and drummer Aaron Mellergårdh. All three members studied jazz and classical music in college and spent several years working as session musicians before forming Dirty Loops as an outlet to express their own eclectic, far-reaching musical vision. Working with manager/producer Andreas Carlsson (as well as executive producer David Foster), the group has put together an album that's one part jazz fusion trio, one part electronic dance outfit, and one part contemporary pop act. Impressively, it also ends up being much more than the sum of its parts. Dirty Loops certainly have chops to spare and layer each track with enough jazz-informed chord progressions, arpeggiated six-string basslines, frenetic drum fills, and melismatic vocal breakdowns to fill any number of Stevie Wonder albums (to name-drop an obvious influence). Thankfully, they also don't forget to bring the pop melody, and cuts like the leadoff "Hit Me," the energetic club anthem "Sexy Girls," and the buoyant "Take on the World" grab you with immediately infectious hooks built largely around Nilsson's highly resonant, charismatic croon. In reality, the tracks on Loopified aren't really all that dissimilar to any number of modern pop hits from Justin Timberlake or Bruno Mars. The difference is primarily in Dirty Loops' high level of technical skill and jazz-infused progressions that lend a deeper harmonic nuance and maturity to their songs, even when they are singing about "sexy girls in the club." Ironically, besides a few cheeky lyrical asides, there's not too much that's very dirty or even musically messy about Dirty Loops here. On the contrary, Loopified is an innovative, pure musical vision of jazzy, infectious, crystalline-produced, club-ready pop.