Uh La La La

The production on this record is almost architectural — you can hear each layer stacked with deliberate precision, the pounding kick drum as the foundation, warm synth pads filling the mid-range, and staccato brass-like stabs punctuating the groove in a way that owes more to Italo dance than to anything happening in northern Europe at the time. Alexia's voice is the element that elevates the whole construction — it has a smoky, slightly husky quality that sounds lived-in and adult amid the gleaming production, and her delivery carries a sly confidence that makes the repetition of that phonetic hook feel like an inside joke shared with the listener. The song is less about lyrical content than about sound as sensation, the title phrase itself functioning as pure vocalic pleasure rather than semantic meaning. There's a wink in the whole enterprise, a self-awareness about the mechanics of pop pleasure, yet the execution is sincere enough that it never tips into parody. Italy's late-nineties contribution to Eurodance often gets overlooked in retrospect in favor of German or Swedish output, but Alexia's records were sharper in their pop instincts than most of what surrounded them. This is summer-evening music, outdoor terrace music, something best heard with the volume slightly too high and nowhere in particular to be.