Head Gone Astray

Metro Area's deliberate evocation of '80s disco does, without explicitly being "electroclash," seem to fall right in line with the cultural (excuse the pun) zeitgeist, which, as we all know, can only serve to expand one's audience. Consequently, from the viewpoint of a certain type of critic, what is so remarkable about a record like Metro Area's is precisely that people who are not techno fans are buying it. There's probably a reason for this; despite my appreciation of minimal techno and my downright love for microhouse, Metro Area's contributions to the Digital Disco comp. left me rather cold, and further perusal of the full-length didn't do anything to sway my initial opinion.

But the critical assumption that underlies this kind of writing/hyping is what bothers me more than any particular instance of it, specifically that dance music is most worthwhile when it isn't somehow dance music. Perhaps the most egregious example in recent memory comes in the form of Pitchfork's review of the new Luomo record, in which Dominique Leone seems to suggest that what makes the record worth writing about is the way in which it is not house music. I couldn't elaborate on it much better than he does himself:

[I]f a jazz drummer with an interest in abstract, improvisational electronic music suddenly starts turning out smooth vocal house records then perhaps there's an expectation that he would be criticized.

"[A]n expectation that he would be criticized"? Why? Luckily for Leone (and, he supposes, the rest of us), this expectation appears to be unfounded, because "this is an easy album to recommend, largely due to it having an impact far beyond the dancefloor." (Emphasis mine) Oh, well, thank God for that.

Throughout the review, Leone makes ample reference to Luomo/Vladislav Delay's background in other styles of music outside of house, as if this is somehow the veneer of legitimacy that a house record needs to be worthy of attention, as with his assumption that Luomo's debut, Vocalcity (a record that Pitchfork somehow managed to overlook at the time of its release) was "an impressive accomplishment for someone admittedly unfamiliar with the genre." Call me optimistic, but I always got the feeling that Vocalcity was a more of a record engaged in dialogue with house music, rather than standing on the outside looking in, as it were, and it is patently absurd to assume that Delay didn't have some kind of knowledge of the genre before he made the first Luomo records.

Interestingly, Leone's main point is one that, technically speaking, I fully agree with; what captivated me about the Luomo records (and microhouse in general) ever since I first heard Vocalcity one particularly intoxicated evening seemingly ages ago was its ability to work both on the dancefloor and off, a situation that, in a perfect world, would contribute to the collapse of the mind/body dichotomy that seems to pervade so much of the critical discourse on dance music; however, what seems to matter most in the critical lexicon is not the combination of the two but rather the latter in and of itself. which is why The Present Lover, a record that is much more of a straightforward house record than its predecessor, in the hands of someone who admits that he "wasn't terribly enamored of the stuff" to begin with, starts sounding a lot less appealing than it really is. Despite the fact that the first Luomo album easily makes my Top 10 Records of All Time, reading the Pitchfork review while anxiously awaiting my own copy of the new one (inexplicably underdistributed here in the Bay Area and, I would assume, the rest of the States as well) put me off from wanting to hear it. What a pleasant surprise, then, to finally get a copy of the record and find out it isn't nearly as "beyond the dancefloor" as Leone would have it sound, ensuring that, until such time as he releases a record that is, Luomo will always be "better known as Vladislav Delay," at least as far as people like Leone are concerned.