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-- Allison Stewart
DOWNLOAD THESE:"Ten Paciencia," "Será Porque Te Amo," "Con Este Amor"
HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR
Hercules and Love Affair
Club kids and/or students of classical mythology, report to the dance floor. Your summer nights have a dazzling new soundtrack thanks to the labors of Andrew Butler, a Brooklynite recording neoclassical disco under the name Hercules and Love Affair. His debut album pulsates with beats and bass lines that hark back to the '70s and lyrics that plead with the gods of antiquity.
Butler's vision is a fantastic one, but he isn't dancing by himself.
The 29-year-old's supporting cast resembles a futuristic Family Stone -- or maybe a cooler, 21st-century C+C Music Factory -- with singers Kim Ann Foxman and Nomi adding chilly coos to "Athene" and "You Belong," respectively, and bassist Tyler Pope double-dribbling across the fretboard during "Blind." But Butler's greatest coup comes with the employ of Antony, the androgynous warbler of Antony and the Johnsons, whose vocal histrionics were made for this kind of music. "My heart it won't stand still," Antony sings on "Time Will," trilling in a register somewhere between bereft house diva and Arthur Russell.
Butler has often stated his admiration of Russell, the late disco maverick who used a panoply of influences to create a dance-floor language all his own. And while Butler hasn't mastered that kind of alchemy here, he's on his way, grabbing fistfuls of shimmering disco, crunchy electro, throbbing acid house, and snapping them together like so many Lego bricks. To hear the final product is to be swept away by it. Polyester toga not included.
-- Chris Richards
DOWNLOAD THESE:"Athene," "Blind," "You Belong"
