New York’s Hercules and Love Affair meshes disco, house, and bold vocals like a dream. Sure, the notion of reviving disco is nothing new. Several bands have tried to do it for years, experimenting with hooks and loops and big vocals to summon up that sound of the 70s. With Hercules and Love Affair, though, it seems less like a refurbishment and more like an establishment of something spanking new for 2008.
It’s really no surprise that this innovation would come out of New York. Take four oddballs steeped in the club scene, mix with disco and house, and out comes Hercules and Love Affair. Led by DJ Andrew Butler, who began his “musical career” at age 15 by working the wheels of steel in a Denver leather bar run by a hostess named Chocolate Thunder Pussy, the collective is audacious and absurdly fun. Antony Hegarty’s (of Antony and the Johnsons) voice fuels the debut self-titled album. Transsexual Nomi and androgynous lesbian Kim Ann Foxmann round out the party people.
Hercules and Love Affair’s debut, released last month, features all of the trappings of excellent disco. Thumping bass lines, ever-present hi-hats, ostentatious yet mysteriously gloomy vocals, and lots of tinkering around. Butler all moves it immaculately, though, creating consistent and accessible music sure to please the East Villagers and basement dwellers alike. It’s good music for us regular folk, too.
The best indicator that Hercules and Love Affair is not simply another disco throwback collective lies in the mournful vocals of Antony Hegarty. He seems fluently tragic, like a sort of anti-hero for the diva movement of the late 70s. The songs have a dim emotion to them as a result, turning full-on dance tracks into affecting pieces of sombre authenticity. Some songs function as a farewell to disco, mourning the end of the free-wheeling days as they gave way to the realities of AIDs and other calamities.
Article comments
1 - Connie Phillips
Congrats! This article has been forwarded to the Advance.net websites and Boston.com.
2 - karla spice
I totally agreed with you. They need to create more ariginal sound, disco will always there, some bands actually tried hard to revive it. Leaving in NY city I have access to all.