What would you expect to find at a dream party? There would be dancing, surely – beautiful people in motion. There’d be great music. Through decoration and creative illumination, an ordinary place might be transformed into somewhere magical. Most of all, there’d be romance. Jodie Jay is throwing a party like that, and you’re invited. The video for “Dream Party,” her debut single, is a full approximation of a fantasy get-together, complete with an alluring setting, the crackle of physical attraction, and a song that absolutely fits the occasion.
“Dream Party” is the sort of assured, impeccably performed, and energetically sung track that a fan might expect to get from an established R&B singer in the midst of her career. Jodie Jay sounds like she’s been doing this for years, and, in a way, she has. She was born into a family of entertainers, and she was determined from a young age to make her voice heard. She wrote the song – and others like it – long ago, and has been refining her sound and delivery ever since. At 17, she’s decided that the time is right, and the world is ready, and we’re pretty sure she’s about to be rewarded for her patience.
Listeners certainly will be. Jodie Jay has a voice that makes an immediate impression: clear and strong, sultry and conversational in its lower register, and electrifying when she reaches for the high notes on the choruses. Her production, too, reveals her to be a musician of uncommon vision and imagination. She’s fused throwback disco, eighties new wave, classic nineties R&B, and modern dance music and fitted it all to a beat that is guaranteed to get the dancefloor moving. Contemporary as she is, she’s also an artist with a firm grounding in the history of pop, and she draws from it judiciously and with the confidence of a young woman who fully expects to be in show business for a long time.
Her sense of personal style is similarly timeless. The “Dream Party” clip combines choreography and lighting inspired by the early days of MTV with fashions reminiscent of the last days of the twentieth century. Jodie Jay and her collaborators have converted a neighborhood bar into a dancehall, and while the feel is modern, there’s nothing in the clip that dates it. The star, for instance, sits on a pinball machine, and there are no personal electronic devices in sight. Disco roller-skaters hit the floor alongside breakdancers in Golden Age hip-hop gear. One thing is consistent: everybody looks terrific. Jodie Jay wouldn’t dream anything less.
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