Hercules and Love Affair - "Hercules and Love Affair"

Hercules and Love Affair - True False, Fake Real (DFA 2008)

Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair / DFA

Andrew Butler is currently at the apex of a coming wave of dance music that I'm not sure he even knows is coming. Nevermind that part of the reason this record is so important is because it's on that hallowed label of cross-pollination, the DFA. Nevermind that Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnstons is on it. Nevermind that one of the biggest debates for this group so far has been over the name: Hercules & Love Affair, or Hercules and Love Affair?

The importance of Hercules and Love Affair (as the album artwork and DFA board now suggest) is this: They have distilled all of the new wave namedropping, all of the hipster posturing, and all of the bastardizations of Moroder in recent years and reached for something much purer. Disco, sans prefix, sans suffix, sans anything but the very music people spent two decades trying to bury the memory of and a little less than a decade trying to revive without seeming too forward. It feels like up until now, nobody has wanted to dip their pen in the ink of disco without first justifying it through tasteful (and often calculated) associations with post-punk or hip-hop or the electronic avant-garde at work in those days.

But the come-hithers of this record are undeniable. Have you heard "Hercules' Theme"?! How can you not get excited about a song that can only be described as a typical Saturday night out in 1978 for disco ducks across the world's major points of hedonistic convention? The answer is that your leather jacket and strong love of the Sex Pistols is stopping you. Linking New York to Rome to Miami to Chicago to Rio and back again, the bloodline of this horn-driven beat is almost as strong as the blow expected to come free with the first 500 pressings of the LP. Kidding. But you're getting the point: Even when Antony isn't on the vocals (and it's about even; he graces lead vocals on four of the album's ten tracks), the haze of the late 70s is strong.

"In truth," writes The Guardian's Peter Robinson, "this Hercules debut is a fairly arty and clever affair not overly preoccupied with provoking perilously wild dancefloor manouevres. But it is still, at its heart, an affectionate trawl through the last few decades of nightclub action." In fact, the opposite is true: Hercules and Love Affair is an arty and clever affair precisely because of its preoccupation with provoking wild dancefloor maneuvers from three decades ago. This album is locked in one specific time and insists that we can join them there, guilt-free, whenever we want. There's no Steve Rubell to stop you at the red rope.

Strain your eyes to see the other influences."You Belong" has shades of trip-hop and that patented DFA cowbell lingers among the percussion of both that and the almost-legendary "Blind," but this has the feeling of Miami in 1982 more than Brooklyn in 2002. I'm not sure what it was about "Iris" that got me, except that it acts as a gorgeous mid-album resetting of the pace in lieu of the high-profile first-half. "Easy" is a nocturnal glide on Antony's quivering accentuation that brings the record to its quietest point. From then on, the glitz and glamor of the first half give way to the after-party comedown closing the second-half. The imprint of the brass on "This is My Love" is indelible, but "True False, Fake Real" is one of the best album closers I've heard in a long time. As its descending chimes and sweeping strings close out the deceptively simple song on an astonishingly poignant note, the sounds of a typewriter clack away spilling the ink of future reviews like this one destined to christen Hercules and Love Affair as the next big bang (or bust; the answer is not clear and only Vince Aletti is probably laughing at this point). It is as close to perfect, as close to closing the circle that disco has left open for so many years, as anyone has ever come.

At the core of disco is dancing (for this is at the core of the existence of a discothèque). My own personal barometer for good disco is my girlfriend, who only listens to music she can rollerskate to. Even through poor speakers on repeat annoyingly ad nauseum, Hercules and Love Affair never wore out on her ears. It may be the only album from 2008 she's actually cared enough to notice, because she sees in this album what Butler sees: an intersection for people to dance to. Kim Ann Foxman has said that the objective is to make music that is impossible for people not to respond to. There is no better example of such drastic reactions to music than disco at its peak.

"Every song is an attempt for me to chase after a moment, every song is the pursuit of some memory," Butler revealed in this year's first Fader. What he left unsaid is that, for the time being, he has captured the very moment of lighting he has sought, bottled it and released it to the world. A friend of mine asked recently, "Who is Hercules and Love Affair? Superstarz, it seems." Not yet, but the hour is fast approaching. Imitators beware: The real thing has returned.