Blue Songs, the new album by Hercules and Love Affair, is awful. I’m not going to mince words here: it’s brutal, terrible, miserable, abominable, abhorrent, and appalling. And it’s really a shame. The band’s 2008 debut was rightly praised as one of the best albums of the past decade. Mixing old school house and disco, the group brought a surprisingly fresh twist to DFA Records’s aging nü-disco shtick. Abetted by Tim Goldsworthy’s (The Rapture, Cut Copy) spectacular production and show-stealing guest vibrato vocals by Antony Hegarty, Hercules and Love Affair was forty-five minutes of anachronistic dance bliss, somewhere between Sylvester, Frankie Knuckles, and LCD Soundsystem.
So what went wrong in three years? The glaring answer is right on the onesheet: H&LA has renovated its cast of characters. Although mastermind Andrew Butler remains on board for Blue Songs, gone are the vocal contributions by Hegarty and the delightfully sexy Nomi Ruiz. Their replacements, with the exception of Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, lack both the name recognition and skill of their predecessors. Although they hold things down on standard H&LA cuts like “Painted Eyes,” you can’t help but wonder how much better Butler’s arrangements would have sounded with Hegarty writing the vocal line. And when H&LA try out newer styles, as on the Herbie Hancock-esque “Answers Come in Dreams,” it’s downright frustrating—these experiments could have turned out fantastic, but instead fall short.
But their sound was also a casualty of organizational shake-ups; the reliable disco stylings of Goldsworthy have been replaced by the work of producer Patrick Pulsinger. The resulting sound is decidedly more spacious—and hardly listenable. Where H&LA’s debut sounded crisp, bright, and immediate, Blue Songs is grossly reverb-laden and distant. Tracks that could have been grade-A bangers at the hands of a more appropriate producer—“My House,” “Falling,” the aforementioned “Painted Eyes”—are flaccid, washed out, and in no way worth your time. Actually, as much as it pains me to say it, just go ahead and apply those descriptors to the whole of Blue Songs.
Voice’s Choice: “Step Up”
