Hercules and Love Affair

“Hercules Theme“
from the album Hercules and Love Affair
2008
iTunes

New York’s Hercules and Love Affair meshes disco, house, and bold vocals like a dream. Sure, the notion of reviving disco is nothing new. Several bands have tried to do it for years, experimenting with hooks and loops and big vocals to summon up that sound of the ’70s. With Hercules and Love Affair, though, it seems less like a refurbishment and more like an establishment of something spanking new for 2008.

It’s really no surprise that this innovation would come out of New York. Take four oddballs steeped in the club scene, mix with disco and house, and out comes Hercules and Love Affair. Led by DJ Andrew Butler, who began his “musical career” at age 15 by working the wheels of steel in a Denver leather bar run by a hostess named Chocolate Thunder Pussy, the collective is audacious and absurdly fun. Antony Hegarty’s (of Antony and the Johnsons) voice fuels the debut self-titled album. Transsexual Nomi and androgynous lesbian Kim Ann Foxmann round out the party people.

Hercules and Love Affair’s debut, released last month, features all of the trappings of excellent disco. Thumping bass lines, ever-present hi-hats, ostentatious yet mysteriously gloomy vocals, and lots of tinkering around. Butler all moves it immaculately, though, creating consistent and accessible music sure to please the East Villagers and basement dwellers alike. It’s good music for us regular folk, too.

The best indicator that Hercules and Love Affair is not simply another disco throwback collective lies in the mournful vocals of Antony Hegarty. He seems fluently tragic, like a sort of anti-hero for the diva movement of the late ’70s. The songs have a dim emotion to them as a result, turning full-on dance tracks into affecting pieces of sombre authenticity. Some songs function as a farewell to disco, mourning the end of the free-wheeling days as they gave way to the realities of AIDs and other calamities.

One of the album’s best tracks, “Blind,” is a clear example of this woeful approach. The brew of horns, strings, house beats, and jangling electronics makes it a prototypical musical homage to the nature of disco music. Yet the lyrics and undercurrents of the track propose something more: “Now that I’m older the stars should lie upon my face/ And when I find myself alone/ I feel like I am blind.”

The brilliant “Hercules Theme” is a superior tune that brims with the lilt of horns and backing vocals (“Yeah, yeah, yeah”) and “Athene” is a beat-happy track ready for dance floors across the world. “This is My Love” is a jazzy beauty and “Raise Me Up” is a club-thumper ready for prime time.

Hercules and Love Affair combines house, disco, and eulogy for the latter so well that it often feels like the New York quartet has invented something new. The heart, soul, and meaning of the disco era seems to have found fresh earth with this album, capturing the dying days of an era with all the melancholy, splendour, allure, and gregariousness required to mine those days of excess.