Jamiroquai AUTOMATON

Recording information: Air Studios, London; Chillington Studios, Buckinghamshire.As the title implies, Jamiroquai's eighth studio album, 2017's Automaton, is a dancefloor-friendly production inspired as much by lead singer Jay Kay's famous love of sports cars as Giorgio Moroder's synth and drum machine-heavy productions of the '70s and '80s. More broadly, the album also fits into Kay's fascination with the effect technology has both positively and negatively on our lives and on the planet (i.e., 1993's "Emergency on Planet Earth" and 1996's "Virtual Insanity"). Which is to say, this is pretty much the same album Kay has been making since at least 2001's A Funk Odyssey. Here, we get several catchy club-ready singles ("Automaton" and "Cloud 9") front-loaded with a handful of inventive album tracks designed for Kay to rock the European tour circuit. To those ends, Automaton works quite well, finding Kay in fluid vocal form and living up to his image as a global, time-traveling, playboy ma