If the title doesn’t give the game away immediately, then a cursory listen should be enough to point you in the direction of Black Devil Disco Club’s inspiration. While there is always the ambiguousness of the distinction between the TR-808 and the MC-808, this is clearly music built on the long associations between the Roland company and the dancefloor.
Synthetic congas and off-beat hi-hats dominate rhythmic proceedings, and the patterns used are fairly directly reminiscent of the glory days of acid house, 303 buzzes and all. Indeed, a great deal of the timbre qualities and the structures of the songs feel like 1988, but somehow Black Devil Disco Club manage to not quite sound retro. ‘With Honey Cream’ sets the pattern with almost Erasure sounding falsetto vocal lines flailing around the disco tempo. And tempo is a key factor across this mini-album, sitting in around the 120bpm groove that predated the rave era and gives the music a great deal more space than the manic-ness of much electronic production of the last 15 years. By dropping every second kick, as in ‘Free For The Girls’ and ‘Never No Dollars’, the four to the floor, often criticised in house music, is opened out even further to allow other percussive and melodic elements the space to breathe.
I can’t quite put my finger on it. Every way I try to describe the music conjures a very specific time and style – 808 State, early Primal Scream – yet this release has its own freshness. Perhaps it’s the fact that most overt references in current pop trends are aimed directly at the early 80s, while this release isn’t, that allows it to have a distinct character. Perhaps it’s my own bias toward the particular era in question here. Perhaps it’s just the loping groove of the last track, ‘For Hoped’, which has me hooked. I can’t help but enjoy the clean, spacious production and the perpetual, seductively forward momentum of every pulse.
Adrian Elmer
*
