- Alison Wonderland can make a dancefloor bump, that’s something which has been pretty clear for some time and anyone who can pack tin sheds from Sydney to Alice Springs and everywhere in between (as she’s doing right now) is certainly, as Diplo said, one of Australia’s best DJs. With her crate full of bass-heavy beats and that very club friendly kind of trap and footwork, it’d be easy to pigeonhole her as Mad Decent on the dancefloor but not much more.

Does the party sensation work as well outside of the party context? Even before you deal with her debut EP, Calm Down, on musical terms, the number of things she’s doing all at once should cause a double-take or two. Obviously not just a DJ, she’s a producer too, OK, but on this EP she’s quite happy being her own dance diva as well: folding lyrical electro-pop in with the enormous beats. It’s an impressive skillset, if you can make it work.

Just catching the singles blared out at top volume continued to make me want to write this off as party fuel, but listening to the EP as a whole, well, it was never going to be backpack, but it’s not stupid either. There’s some great synth lines at play in these five cuts, especially the quieter ones. AW is clearly not just a capable beat maker, but one with a keen musicality. It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that until this whole DJing thing blew up, she was over in Germany, doing some serious training to be a classical cellist. She’s been quoted as saying:

I think with producing, you need to be a musician. You need to understand music if you’re going to produce music...you need to be musical to be a DJ...but to have a background in composition and the actual theory, that really helps with the production because you understand key and you understand a lot of things.

Looking at the likes of LMFAO I think there’s some serious opposition to the idea that you need to be in any way musical to rule the dancefloor, but on Calm Down, gosh, it makes for some better listening. Once you get past the stupendously huge bass and completely bombastic trap of cuts like Cold or her current big single, I Want U, the pop songwriting has both sweetness and a surprising depth. It becomes that much more obvious on the comparatively subtle cuts, like the silky footwork of Lies or the MIA-esque closer, Space, and its bonding of a cello melody with a truly awesome synth rhythm section.

The last time I got this excited by a bonding of good beats, production and excellent pop songwriting was when Haim hit town. Well there’s three of them and they don’t do their own production. Alison Wonderland appears to be the complete package.

- Chris Cobcroft.