LA duo relive dance music's glory days, with a contemporary slant and a nostalgic sigh
Hometown: Los Angeles.
The lineup: Michael David and Tyler Blake.
The background: Disco and synthpop occupy different cultural spaces and cater to different demographics, but both are amply served by Classixx, who aren't to be confused with ancient synthpop group Classix Nouveaux although the LA pair do use synthesizers, like, a lot. They don't particularly sound like an '80s synth duo; theirs is more the kind of music a producer, a backroom boy, might have come up with between the twin heydays of disco and electrofunk, i.e. between 1977 and 1982. It's probably no coincidence that one of the tracks on their debut album, Hanging Gardens, is called Supernature, the same title as the 1977 hit by pioneering disco producer Cerrone. There's another track on the album called Borderline, the same title as the early Madonna hit. Their personal pantheon evidently comprises the electronic(a) fan's equivalent of a classic rock record collection: Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, Giorgio Moroder, Daft Punk, Kraftwerk, DFA and Talking Heads. The debut single from Blake's solo project Fingerpaint, Lunar, featured a sample from Arthur Russell's This Is How We Walk On the Moon. And before they were Classixx, they did remixes as Young Americans, the nod to the 1975 Bowie LP a pointed one: that was Year Zero for white boys offering their own take on black dance music.
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There are allusions in their music, too, to classic FM rock at its lushest (the title track of their album sounds like a funked-up Fleetwood Mac), as well as to later developments in electronic dance music (though not to EDM) such as Chicago house and Balearica, and most recently the laptop chilldisco of Active Child and Toro Y Moi. In fact, they've toured with Toro, while Pat Grossi, who is Active Child, appears on the album, as does Sarah Chernoff of Superhumanoids, Jesse Kivel of Kisses and Nancy Whang of DFA. You can tell a lot about a band from the company they keep.
Much of Hanging Gardens has a sort of nostalgic-for-now quality of ebullient sadness that works well as a soundtrack for late summer. Some of the instrumentals lack the - dynamism's the wrong word, but certainly they don't engage emotionally as efficiently as the ones with singing. Whang's vocals on All You're Waiting For are very ZE - they have the adenoidal tone of the distanced and detached, the wryly non-committal, but the chorus is rapturous. Holding On would work superbly in a set alongside Daft Punk's One More Time and, indeed, Holy Ghost!'s Hold On, with its early-Chic bassline and handclaps, its disco-redolent atmosphere carrying with it an appropriate sense of lost-lustre. They're clearly in love with dance music's third - and arguably greatest - golden age (after Motown and Philly) and are relishing the opportunity to recreate it, while luxuriating in its melancholy and infinite sadness, as that other pioneering disco maverick Billy Corgan once put it.
The buzz: "Brings a swooning Cali-pop melodic slickness to the stripped-down, synthetic thump of ye olde Chicago house music."
The truth: These Classixx aren't exactly Nouveaux, but they're good.
Most likely to: Have a smashing time.
Least likely to: Smash a pumpkin.
What to buy: Hanging Gardens is out now on Innovative Leisure.
File next to: Breakbot, Active Child, Holy Ghost!, Toro Y Moi.
Links: classixx.la.
Wednesday's new band: The Preatures.
by Paul Lester via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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