Review by WilliamRauscher : Your first live show is always a turning point. It says, This isn’t just something we do in the basement anymore. You're probably nervous, so maybe it’s best to just invite ten close friends, the ones who are always happy to support your indulgences and won’t mind if you forget how to play. Hercules & Love Affair, the new, highly touted, shiny disco jewel in the crown of DFA Records, did not have such a luxury. For their first show ever -- on May 17 at Studio B -- was in front of a sold-out crowd, at an all-night event sponsored by downtown fashion force Opening Ceremony. Hercules’s self-titled album is the brainchild of New York DJ Andrew Butler. He roped in a number of collaborators, including Tim Goldsworthy of DFA to produce and Antony of Antony and the Johnsons to sing. Despite the live instrumentation, the record doesn’t come off like a band playing together but like polished dance compositions that happen to feature humanoid musicians.
Thus, the live performance wasn’t only remarkable for being a grand unveiling for the next phase in the rising wave of New York disco, but also as a testing ground for the tricky translation from studio composition to live experience. Ever since 1974, when Frank Farian, the German svengali later responsible for Milli Vanilli, composed and sang all the vocals on a cheesey track called “Do You Wanna Bump?” and then hired performers to act as the band Boney M, there’s been a need for disco masterminds to make their lab creations come to life.
Not to say by any stretch that the Hercules & Love Affair live-show posse are any kind of contract labor like in Farian’s case. Far from it. It’s a ten-person dance army, with Butler heading up a four-man rhythm section, plus two horn players, two singers, and, very important, two vogue dancers. That's important because, flanking the stage with incessant strutting and undulations, they turned it from a show into an event. Their very presence said Studio 54, Larry Levan, David Mancuso, and so on -- the great and until recently rather ghettoized heritage of New York disco.
For the most part, the translation process was a success, and the show made it clear why listening to any kind of dance music on your iPod speakers at home is kind of like taking a shower with a raincoat on: The sheer surging physicality is lost. While the corporeality of Hercules & Love Affair’s glitzy, flamboyant stomp was in full effect, however, some details in the group’s dense compositions did get lost in the ruckus, be it some of the busier horn lines or the beautiful shape of the long, winding vocal line that takes flight in their terrific single, “Blind.”
The extended-groove outros were without exception both effective and abruptly ended. With time, maybe Butler’s group can take a cue from LCD Soundsystem, the Zeus of the DFA Parthenon, and gather the courage to let the compositions’ gathered steam fuel the funk train into uncharted territory.
***
About Hercules And Love Affair
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York.
The lineup: Andrew Butler (DJ, producer) plus collaborators Antony, Nomi and Kim Ann.
The background: "Experimental disco" would seem to be a contradiction in terms, trying to apply Ideas and A Strategy to a music whose raison d'etre has always been, to paraphrase the original disco dolly, that "only when you're dancing do you feel this free" - "free" as in unencumbered by thought or intellect or indeed anything but the desire to sustain the body's perpetual motion. But there is a long and illustrious lineage of clever-clogs club music, and in fact it could reasonably be argued that the history of dance music, from Motown and Philly to Chic, Jam & Lewis and beyond to today's Timbaland and Neptunes, is really the story of brainiac behind-scenes (male) technicians contriving illusorily intuitive melodies and rhythms for women to sing and dance to.
All of which brings us to Hercules & Love Affair, a fancy cover for a New York producer/DJ called Andrew Butler, who a couple of years back decided to make the leap from college-based dance projects to fully-fledged recording artist, via the NYC art scene. His debut album is co-produced by himself and Tim Goldsworthy of DFA at Plantain Studios in Manhattan, and yet, with vocal contributions from Antony (of & the Johnsons), a woman called Nomi whose own debut album Lost In Lust was described as "Sade meets Wu-Tang Clan's RZA", and acid-house DJ/singer Kim Ann, it sounds quite unlike that LCD-affiliated production unit's usual punk-funk. The latter's track Athene, for example, sounds like Sylvester's Mighty Real in a mighty murk, and like much of the album evokes Arthur Russell's woozy psych-disco, Kevin Saunderson's Inner City, and old Chicago house only with a 2008 matte varnish.
Mostly it sounds like proper late-70s disco. Not the camp glitterball retro electro-pop of Kylie circa Spinning Round, but actual underground disco, like something long-lost from the vaults of the Loft or the Paradise Garage, real 1977-78 vintage stuff. Hercules' Theme is the highpoint and absolutely the best thing Antony has ever put his mannered croon to, with its Cerrone-style strings, muted horn parps and production sound so authentic you fully expect John Travolta to come sashaying across your field of vision. Opening track Time Will is slower and sadder, locating the melancholy at the heart of the dance. Then there's You Belong, which recalls classic Salsoul, or Inner City's Good Life, only with all the goodness and life sucked out of it. It sounds pleasingly enervated: dance music as debilitating fever, or something.
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