Review: The Synth-Dance Sound Of The 1980s Is Back In Humming Urban Stereo's 'Rollercoaster' Featuring Sugar Flow [AUDIO]

Prince would be proud.

Humming Urban Stereo's new single "Rollercoaster" featuring Sugar Flow instantly dials in the sound of the androgynous high priest of funk's 1980s R&B utopia--a time when as Charlie Murphy once put it, "the guy who looked the most like a bitch was getting all the women."

Humming Urban Stereo is a one-man band featuring studio mastermind Lee Jeereen and is often fueled by guest star Sugar Flow's sex-dripped vocals.

Lee and Sugar Flow (whose real name is Song Hwa Young) are frequent collaborators, also playing in the band Instant Romantic Floor with South Korean rapper YeSlow.

But unlike most of the Instant Romantic Floor material, which features a more, house-music vibe, with Humming Urban Stereo, Lee appears to be reaching into the past to revisit some of dance pop's best moments.

Other than a couple quick detours into dub step territory, the production on "Rollercoaster" locks into Prince's "Red Corvette"-era sound, complete with gated snare and deep synthesizer grooves, and stays there.

And he pulls it off. The beat is infectious, and the production doesn't have the nauseating clarity that modern day attempts to duplicate classic 1980s dance albums often have.

One of the things that made Prince's recording great is the fact that there were mistakes; there were raw moments.

Although many of them went on to be pop music juggernauts, all of Prince's songs have a wonderfully homemade quality to them.

Madonna's early recordings like "Lucky Star" and "Into The Groove," which "Rollercoaster" also contains elements of, contained that same dance floor rawness.

Humming Urban Stereo manages to capture that homemade, raw-but-dancey-as-hell quality that is at the heart of all the best 1980s dance music with "Rollercoaster," which debuted this week at number 27 on the Billboard K-Pop Hot 100.

Overall, Sugar Flow does a fantastic job with her vocals.

She slinks onto the track, with all the breath of Prince proteges Wendy and Lisa, or even the man himself in female Korean form.

Her vocal performance exudes the oversexed sound of the 1980s era.

The one unfortunate moment is the hook, which consists of Song just singing the words "Rollercoaster roller-rollercoaster" again and again.

Something about the way that Sugar Flow rolls her 'R's in "Rollercoaster" breaks the spell that up until that point had made the fact that she wasn't singing in English irrelevant.

Musically, she doesn't have much to work with either. The song really needed a B part-- a musical change of equal quality. That's one thing Prince wouldn't have stood for in the studio.

Suddenly the listener is awoken from what was a potent time-travelling spell.

Fortunately though, the groove comes back soon after, along with Sugar Flow's irresistible verse hook. Then you're back in 1980s bliss.

Listen to the Back In Humming Urban Stereo song "Rollercoaster" featuring Sugar Flow RIGHT HERE

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Humming Urban Stereo
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