{"id":40871,"date":"2008-05-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/hercules-and-love-affair\/"},"modified":"2008-05-09T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T00:00:00","slug":"hercules-and-love-affair","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/hercules-and-love-affair\/","title":{"rendered":"Hercules And Love Affair"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems like the further away from disco we get, the better the music from that era sounds. Granted, I wasn\u2019t there for it, so I didn\u2019t experience it firsthand. Perhaps I\u2019d feel differently about the genre had I been forced to listen to it daily on Top 40 radio. But I\u2019ve never especially hated<\/i> disco music. The Saturday Night Fever<\/i> soundtrack was released in 1977 \u2013 the same year as Hotel California <\/i>and Rumours<\/i> \u2013 and it would become the record that legitimized disco as a commercially viable style of music. Hell, given a choice between Saturday Night Fever<\/i> and Boston<\/st1:place><\/st1:city>\u2019s self-titled debut, I\u2019d take the damn disco any day. For me, the further I get from music that was shitty to begin with (\u201cMore Than A Feeling,\u201d \u201cPeace Of Mind\u201d), the shittier it sounds, the more bland and dated. But disco, although dated, wasn\u2019t trash; people just thought it was at the time. We know retrospectively that the Bee Gees were geniuses and we also know that disco laid the foundation for modern dance music and culture. <\/p>\n

Rock critics everywhere are cautiously avoiding boiling Hercules And Love Affair\u2019s self-titled debut album down to \u201cgenre revivalism.\u201d Fair enough. If you accuse the New York-based dance outfit of simply releasing a record of mimicry and nothing more, then you\u2019ve also missed how articulate and smart Hercules And Love Affair<\/i> really is. But the fact that critics are making it a point to mention that they\u2019re not<\/i> reducing the album to nostalgic masturbation doesn\u2019t mean that it isn\u2019t. It is. And that\u2019s okay. This is a tremendously exciting record from a tremendously exciting group of New York-based DJs and disco-ducks. It\u2019s alright to call it genre revivalism because it is, but it\u2019s smart revivalism. Hercules And Love Affair<\/i> is a fascinating disco record and all the hype and the five-star reviews are well deserved. <\/p>\n

With accomplished New York DJ Andy Butler as their commander-in-chief, the group is an orgy of talent. Antony Hegarty of Antony And The Johnsons lends his bizarre \u2013 and gorgeous \u2013 pipes to half of the album\u2019s tracks, making songs like \u201cTime Will\u201d and \u201cBlind\u201d not only the best songs on the record, but also some of the best songs of the year. Lead vocals are shared with a band member listed as simply Nomi, who spices up other album highlights like \u201cHercules Theme\u201d and \u201cYou Belong\u201d with her delicious singing. A third vocalist, Kim Ann Foxman, strikes a nice, subdued contrast with her work on \u201cAthene,\u201d \u201cIris,\u201d and \u201cTrue False\/Fake Real.\u201d The front half of the disc is funked-up, spazzed-out, neo-disco perfection. Each song begs the listener to make it number one. The second half is the slower, stranger, spookier (less impressive) half of the album, but slow-burners like \u201cIris\u201d and \u201cEasy\u201d sort of round-out the record and showcase Hercules And Love Affair\u2019s ingenuity and electro smarts. <\/p>\n

It would be unfair to reduce this album to nothing more than nostalgia, because that would indeed ignore the quality and substance of the record and also how well they explore nostalgia. But beyond that, a reduction of that sort ignores the fact that Hercules And Love Affair are brimming with versatile and contrasting talent. They\u2019ve brilliantly mashed up thirty years of dance music history onto one record \u2013 disco, new-wave, synth-pop, house, electronic \u2013 and so not only have they revived these dance genres, they\u2019ve practically reinvented them. Hercules And Love Affair<\/i> is a phenomenally appealing record and a must-buy for anyone interested in hearing how best to pay homage to our pop-music ancestors. I can\u2019t recommend this album enough.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":29320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8194],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40871","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-hercules-and-love-affair","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40871"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40871"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}