Occasionally, songs take on qualities that their authors never intended them to have. The passage of time casts different light on them; political groups and protest movements co-opt them, lending unanticipated meaning to the words; artists unexpectedly die and their final work becomes freighted with poignancy. To a roll-call that includes Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street, John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over, Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm and McFadden & Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, we now might add, a little unexpectedly, the third album by Surrey-born pop-house duo Disclosure, which events overtook before it was even released.
There may have been less opportune moments in history to put out an album filled with songs hymning the pleasures of clubs, of dancing en masse and of fleeting eyes-meeting-across-the-dancefloor romance, but you struggle to think of one. Energy arrives in a world where most venues are shuttered and festivals cancelled, where dancing with others carries with it the potential of contracting a fatal illness, where illegal raves have become a bigger public bugbear than in the Criminal Justice Act-provoking wake of Castlemorton, and where the dance scene has recently been convulsed by an argument about whether DJs should DJ at all. Online footage of big name DJs playing in continental Europe this month was greeted with general horror, the legal but maskless, non-socially-distanced “plague raves” they were performing at held by some to have contributed to a rise in Covid-19 infections.
The circumstances mean the songs on Energy take on a slightly peculiar tone. There’s something inadvertently desperate about My High’s refrain of “please don’t fuck up my high” and something inadvertently mournful about the title track’s repurposing of a motivational speaker, ostensibly intended to chivvy the dancefloor along into delirium. “Right now,” he bellows, over an impressively relentless samba house-inspired backing, “you should feel invincible, powerful, strong” – under the circumstances, the emphasis seems to land on the word “should”, rather than the adjectives. You listen to Kelis singing “I like to dance like I’m alone in the room” on opener Watch Your Step and think: you must have been having the time of your life since March, then.
It’s obviously not Disclosure’s fault that Energy has ended up sounding – at least temporarily – oddly depressing, a succession of paeans to a world of carefree hedonism that’s out of reach for the foreseeable future. Besides, they might reasonably argue, it doesn’t matter. Their sound might be based in house music, but Disclosure’s oeuvre has always flourished more in the charts than on the dancefloor: it seems likely that the big names that flocked to appear on their last album, 2015’s Caracal – Lorde, the Weeknd, Gregory Porter and Miguel among them – were drawn less by the duo’s mastery of four-to-the-floor beats and ability to evoke sweaty, small-hours transcendence in front of the big speakers than they were by the fact that Caracal’s predecessor, Settle, contained five hit singles, three of them platinum, and helped make a transatlantic star of then-unknown guest vocalist Sam Smith.
It’s a talent that’s still in evidence on Energy, albeit flickering a little more intermittently. My High pivots, thrillingly, on the difference between rappers Aminé and Slowthai. The former opts for relatively laconic in-the-club boasting, the latter sounds like he’s rapping while being manhandled out of the venue by bouncers, bug-eyed, and the sudden increase in tension and drama is authentically gripping. Fatoumata Diawara’s appearance on Douha (Mali Mali) is the album’s highlight, a sparkling, effortlessly euphoric take on 90s filter-heavy French house. Kelis’s insouciant, tough turn on Watch Your Step, a strong syndrum-assisted bit of disco house, is coated in a thin layer of crispy distortion.
But the album is bullishly short – 40 minutes – which makes its longueurs more obvious. The UK garage-indebted Who Knew? smears Mick Jenkins’ vocal with effects that sound less like Auto-Tune than an old-fashioned vocoder: floating something ethereal over the urgent beat and retorts of noisy electronics is a nice idea, but the song itself doesn’t go anywhere. Lavender and Ce N’est Pas – a collaboration with Cameroonian vocalist Blick Bassy – are similarly underwhelming: nice enough, but nothing to set your pulse racing, they make you wish that Disclosure would throw caution to the wind, scuff their sound up more, occasionally chuck the listener a curveball. The closest Energy comes to that is on the brief Thinking ’Bout You, which takes a razor to an obscure piece of early 70s Canadian blue-eyed soul, and the dreamy R&B slow jam Birthday, complete with heavy-lidded vocals by Kehlani and the Internet’s Syd, both of which hint tantalisingly at a creative expansiveness.
For now, however, Disclosure seem largely content to stick to their lane. It should keep their career ticking over commercially until normal clubland service is resumed, and their lyrics seem less wistful.
What Alexis listened to this week
The Harlem Gospel Travellers: Fight On
Old-fashioned gospel soul repurposed for the BLM era: plaintive, stirring, funky and fantastic.
