Album Review: Elton John Vs. PNAU - Good Morning To The Night

During the making of Pnau's second album, Soft Universe, in London last year, lady luck flashed her beatific pearly whites in the direction of Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes. Hanging out with Elton John in the studio was one thing, signing with his management in Australia was another, but rerecording an album's worth of Elton's back catalogue with the man's blessing, with his input no less? Get outta here.

The result is a musical mash-up outfit aptly titled Elton John Vs Pnau, and as far as the tired and dated curiosity of big personality-driven collaborations goes, Good Morning To The Night is really a decent offering and not one to be instantly thrown on the dusty pile with Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney or Aerosmith and Run DMC.

The title track is distinctly painted with a brush from Empire Of The Sun's paintbox, not so much Pnau, with those mid-range guitar twangs underscoring Elton's vocal, treated with a fair amount of reverb amongst synth swirls, Black Icy Stare adding some reggae sass that wouldn't be out of place on the original. Telegraph To The Afterlife channels a bit of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb with eerie distorted guitars and spacey wailing 'hellos'. At just eight tracks, it's pretty succinct, but on closer inspection the number of songs plundered for samples is quite amazing.

Fans of either the knighted diva-dude or the dynamic Sydney dance duo, or both, will find myriad delights providing they remember that despite the collaboration moniker, it's not an exercise in bettering Sir Elton's classics, it simply adds a colourful and original dimension to them. Mission accomplished.