Marco Niemerski's music is cheesy, but we love him for it. His knack for deliriously happy songs ("Coma Cat," his remix of "Reckless With Your Love") has led to brushes with the mainstream, which he finally embraced with 2012's "Mainline" on Defected, a rote exercise in '90s vocal house that only earned him a bigger audience. Now he's signed to Astralwerks, and with the full force of the pop machine behind him, Glow is his unmistakable grab at the charts—but one still suffused with some of that old Tensnake glimmer. The resulting album is every bit as conflicting as that sounds.
Glow dumbs down Niemerski's music into mass market-ready chunks. It's like he's taken a coat of plastic wrap and applied it liberally to the whole album, leaving it texturally uniform and smooth, but curiously distant. There are wrinkles in such an all-encompassing approach, particularly the instrumentals, which are so atrocious it's hard to fathom why they were included at all. Thankfully, the majority of Glow features vocalists to fill the blanks. Outside of two spots from Jeremy Glenn and Jamie Lidell, the album may as well be credited to Tensnake and Fiora, the Australian singer who steals the spotlight from her producer more than once.