Album Review: Mark Ronson - Uptown Special

Ronson continues to dazzle with his chameleonic production skills, this time with deep funk and soul grooves.

Talent abounds with vocals from Stevie Wonder, Andrew Wyatt, Bruno Mars and Jeff Bhasker among others. Then there’s novelist Michael Chabon crafting lyrics performed with exquisite falsetto by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on Daffodils. Fantastically, it all works. Hit single, Uptown Funk, is an outlier, its overt bombast in stark contrast to the otherwise mellow sophistication.

Ronson is the master of splicing together a genre’s most prominent sounds to form a hyper-version of it, and here, a masterful funk-disco record.