This was the year in which new faces of UK dance emerged – and Disclosure stole the show, with a little help from their friends
• See all our Best Albums of 2013 coverage here
If Disclosure took 2013 by storm then it was with some degree of stealth. On the one hand they were the big draw at festivals – the lure of White Noise helped block walkways at Glastonbury, pack tents at Field Day, and, improbably, steal Nine Inch Nails' crowd at Reading and Leeds. But on the other hand you got the feeling you'd still struggle to recognise a member of Disclosure in the street, even if said member was wearing a Disclosure T-shirt, playing Disclosure from a Disclosure-branded boombox and shouting, "Oi mate, I'm that bloke out of Disclosure". Indeed, so desperate were NME to make Guy and Howard Lawrence stand out in some way on their cover that they resorted to printing their images upside down.
This didn't feel like the careful cultivation of anonymity so beloved of hipster blog favourites but more a return to the faceless dance artists of the 90s. And yet the music on Disclosure's debut album, Settle, feels anything but faceless: it has soul, it has warmth and on the final track, Help Me Lose My Mind – which features the ever-haunting vocals of London Grammar's Hannah Reid – it has a real emotional depth.
That is partly down to their influences – deep house and UK garage are hardly genres that lack feeling – and partly down to the ease with which they can knock out a pop melody as sparkling as You & Me. But it is also testament to the way in which the brothers, aware of their lack of pop star charisma, drafted in guest vocalists to handle that side of things for them. Sure, loading a dance record with turns from the pop and indie world, such as The Chemical Brothers and Noel Gallagher – itself a very 90s thing – can set alarm bells ringing, but never are the names on Settle plonked on there for the sake of credibility (and with all due respect, if you were only in it for the star power, then Eliza Doolittle and that bloke Ed Macfarlane from Friendly Fires might not be the first names on your to-dial list). In fact, it's to Disclosure's immense credit that Jessie Ware (Confess To Me), AlunaGeorge (White Noise) and Sam Smith (Latch) feel not as if they're offering stand-out performances, but are a necessary part of the fabric of the album.
Reading on mobile? Listen to Settle on Spotify here
Earlier this year, the Guardian rounded up a series of faces we believed represented a new wave of UK dance: Disclosure rubbed shoulders with Rudimental, A*M*E, MNEK and Duke Dumont as part of a mini-scene producing what Guardian writer Alex Macpherson called "the perfect present-day culmination of past club trends". Disclosure certainly harked back to the past – Kristine Blond's Love Shy is as old as OK Computer, after all – but whereas Settle is hardly a forward-thinking statement it certainly sounds like it has a spring in its 2-step. Much like Katy B's debut in 2011, Settle feels new simply by offering a much-needed respite from the sounds that have dominated dance music for the past few years: dope-fugged dubstep and the more brain cell-phobic end of electronic dance music.
Perhaps this is the main reason why so many of our critics voted for Settle: ironically, given the Lawrence brothers' perceived lack of personality, this was a record that really did stand out from the crowd.
by Tim Jonze via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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