Artist: Roger Sanchez
Album: Come With Me
Label: Ultra Records
Tracks: 11
Review By: Jacob Gehman

Dance music can be enjoyable, especially when it is creative and sonically powerful. It can force joy to make your flesh tingle and time fade away. Or it  can be weak and uninspired and absolutely painful to listen to. Unfortunately for us Roger Sanchez has either unwittingly made one of the most painful albums to listen to this year, or he is some kind of sadist who wants to trap people in his own personal hell.

“Come With Me” starts off with the song “Turn On the Music.” Immediately noticeable is the subdued, flat-sounding electronics and beats that are supposed to drive the song. They are barely adequate for a local karaoke night at a bar, let alone the introductory track from the new album by the legendary Roger Sanchez. The chorus is at first catchy and almost promises to save the song. Four minutes into the song the chorus is overplayed and cliché. Six minutes into it you’re begging it to stop. A song that could have been pretty good at the three minute length gets absolutely destroyed by forcing it to drag on and on.

Track two, “Take A Chance,” continues down the trail of boring mediocrity. It absolutely fails to take any kind of chances musically or thematically by slipping into the realm of female pop. It would have been horrible, though more at home, on a Jennifer Lopez album and it is equally bad here.

Things don’t get any better. “Come With Me” sounds like an album you write if all you pay attention to is pop culture icons who the press pays too much attention to and you’re trying to score a world-wide hit. However, Roger Sanchez isn’t a sex icon, which is the only reason the world pays attention to artists like Jennifer Lopez in the first place.

This album only has eleven tracks, but it feels like double that amount when you play through it. Sanchez will only succeed with this album if any of the tracks get picked up for car commercials at takes the Moby route. But that will only get him some fast cash, not the world-wide attention it appears he was aiming for.