Hercules & Love Affair - some initial reactions

Lotta hype about these guys. Listening for the first time on this blustery December day, and of course it's not quite the watershed the hipsters have been priming us for, but it's pretty damn good.

I've been raring for a return to album reviews for like three years, and I figure it's only fair to mark the occasion with a knee-jerk style post in the blogosphere spirit of the day (ok, I'm dating myself here - kneejerk blog posts are so 2005, but I never latch onto trends until long after they've run their course anyway, so this is something you and I are just going to have to get used to).

As with a lot of modern dance music and pretty much anything that's endorsed by Pitchfork these days (about that - what the fuck, Schreiber?), the self-titled debut offering by Hercules & Love Affair offers some terrific grooves undercut by irritating vocals. Unlike a lot of modern dance music, the grooves don't just fritter away - these guys know their history, and if you can learn to hear past Antony's unholy cross between an ethered Scott Walker and potato-shaped tabloid queen Boy George (N.B. I mean the "queen" part as a compliment; it's the rest that's an insult, as the former George O'Dowd hit his Fat Elvis phase long about 1998, and from the sound of it Antony's already well on his way) you'll find the kind of beatmastery Larry Levan could only dream of.

In a development I never could have anticipated amidst the rockist fuckery of my teenage years, I've lately been evolving into the same sort of disco geek who used to frequent Levan's legendary Paradise Garage throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s - the golden age of modern dance music to my ears. So the nagging percussion, synth squiggles and mathematical basslines of this record are manna to somebody like me, although I still wish they were unhip enough to hire actual singers. Meanwhile, I look forward to untangling the grooves in weeks to come, which are proof positive of what I'd already figured out: disco geeks are the smartest music fans in the world.