Hercules and Love Affair (album)

Untitled

Hercules and Love Affair is the debut album by American house group Hercules and Love Affair. The album, which was released by DFA Records in the United Kingdom on March 10 2008 and a day later in North America, was produced by Andy Butler and Tim Goldsworthy. The album was recorded at the Plantain Studios in Manhattan. Andrew Raposo (of fellow DFA band Automato) and Tyler Pope (of !!!) contributed bass to the album.

Reception

The album reached number thirty-one in the UK and the top twenty in Belgium and Norway.

The album received an almost exclusively positive response from the critical community. Fact Magazine called it "a unique, deeply satisfying and insanely catchy piece of work." Pitchfork Media's Philip Sherburne awarded the album 9.1/10, and described it as "Lush, melancholic, gregarious, generous, both precise and a little bit unhinged" before going on to proclaim "this is the most original American dance album in a long while." Observer critic Paul Flynn bestowed on the album similarly lavish praise, awarding it a maximum five stars, commenting that the album "concentrates on the musicality of the [disco] genre and leaves the cliches for dust," adding "it is as sweaty, raw and meaningful as the first 12-inch singles that were spun at NY lofts."

Guardian critic Alexis Petridis was slightly more skeptical, finding the album's first side to be "tremendous fun," but - as a result of its being confined to genre revivalism - to possess "an air of pointlessness." However, he deemed the inclusion of Hegarty's melancholic vocals in the disco setting to be "inspired," and praised the album's "far more inventive second half [,as] its atmosphere shifts from touchy-feely warmth to queasy unease to deep melancholy, as if the authors keep being jolted from their nostalgic musical reverie by the thought of how horribly it all ended."

Music

Most reviewers comment on the album's musical style as an homage to or re-imagining of Disco music. Fact Magazine dubbed the album's style "a pulsating, glamorous, elegiac mix of classic disco influences, live instrumentation and modernist, mind-spangling electronic production." Similarly, Telegraph critic Bernadette McNulty dubs the music "d-i-s-c-o in its seventies glory" into which "Butler weaves [...] fractured Chicago house beats and pulsing synths," going on to refer to the overall style of the album as "a tableau of beautiful, dysphoric disco visions." . The Guardian also describes the music in the same terms, commenting "it sounds like proper late-70s disco. Not the camp glitterball retro electro-pop of Kylie circa "Spinning Round", but actual underground disco, like something long-lost from the vaults of The Loft or the Paradise Garage, real 1977-78 vintage stuff." . However, while most focus on the obvious musical debt to disco, some critics highlight the album's eclectic range of styles, such as Eddy Lawrence, for whome the album "has dark, psychedelic moments, such as the downbeat, mildly menacing, almost Congotronic ‘Easy’ alongside outright funky party stuff like ‘You Belong’." Butler himself describes the album's musical approach thus:

I always say it’s a rhythmic, artsy kind of pop music that was made with classic dance and electronic music in mind. It has a lot of vocals and is rooted in my childhood.

The album's first single "Blind" was released on March 3 2008 and reached number forty on the UK Singles Chart. NME called it a "stone-cold classic," going on to describe it as "the best kind of dance record: physical and emotional, euphorically happy and deeply, irredeemably sad. It clips along weightlessly; all disco bass, trumpets and rippling synthesiser, as Antony, his voice like tears rolling down the cheeks of a beautiful 40-year-old woman, muses intoxicatingly on lost innocence and ageing." The song and its video were also received well at Pitchfork Media.

Promotional videos

The promotional video for the album's first single "Blind" was directed by London-based Saam , who had previously produced music videos for artists such as Klaxons ("Golden Skans," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Magick") and Lightspeed Champion ("Tell Me What it's Worth"). The video, which features actress Jamie Winstone of 2006 UK film Kidulthood shows, through clouds of smoke, a "bacchanalian orgy tak[ing] place all around her, hearkening back to the pre-AIDS days of disco and places like the Continental Baths, where Larry Levan DJed and which advertisers promoted as recalling "the glory of ancient Rome".

Track listing

1. "Time Will" – 4:34
2. "Hercules Theme" – 4:30
3. "You Belong" – 4:12
4. "Athene" – 4:00
5. "Blind" – 6:18
6. "Iris" – 4:16
7. "Easy" – 5:22
8. "This Is My Love" – 4:58
9. "Raise Me Up" – 3:52
10. "True False/Fake Real" – 4:33

Charts

Charts (2008)	Peak position
Belgian Albums Chart	12
Irish Albums Chart	44
Norwegian Albums Chart	18
Swedish Albums Chart	23
UK Albums Chart	31