Subway II by Subway
LABEL: Soul Jazz Records

“...recontextualizes the best of Detroit techno, krautrock, and some of the more salient emerging textures of the nu-disco era into something far greater than the sum of its parts.”

Over the past decade, London-based Soul Jazz Records has cultivated a solid niche as the primary republisher of dusty dub plates, little-heard post-tropicalia excursions, venerable proto-disco cuts, and a litany of other bizarre obscurities. It’s an aesthetic that is quite copasetic with the vision of Michael Kirkman and Alan James, two aging rave enthusiasts-cum-born again krautrockers whose portentous Subway project may bring Soul Jazz out of the bell-bottomed haze and into a nebulous space that label founder Stuart Baker is already describing (with approbation, one hopes) as “post-dance”. Although they have yet to galvanize audiences in the same way that some of their more tuneful admirers have long succeeded, their all-instrumental sophomore manifesto—the wryly-titled Subway II—recontextualizes the best of Detroit techno, krautrock, and some of the more salient emerging textures of the nu-disco era into something far greater than the sum of its parts. If Ornette Coleman’s free funk-tinged Dancing in Your Head started a surreptitious movement in avant-garde pop that gained momentum about a decade later with Captain Beefheart’s final recordings and acid house before peaking with the ascension of jungle/dubstep in recent years, then this is the plateau—and a fantastic antidote for the usual “I don’t understand electronic music!” excoriations. When the novelty of Dan Deacon’s live shows invariably wears off in a few years, expect him to take the plunge into these waters.

The opening “Persuasion” and “Lowlife” are perfect amalgamations of cusp-of-the-decade ponderousness and winking Human League pastiche, but it is on the more textural cuts—such as the cacophonous “Jupiter”, a distant cousin of Raymond Scott’s laboratory experiments—that Kirkman and James emerge as dance music avatars, taking the necessary risks in a genre that was once hardly bereft of madcap visionaries. While it’s doubtful that this redoubtable duo will ever cross over much beyond the DJ cognoscenti, expect this forward-thinking album to grow in critical stature over the next few years.

REVIEWED BY SEAN MURPHY
SEAN'S FAVORITE TRACKS: "Persuasion" • "Harmonia" • "Lowlife"
Read more by Sean Murphy on his blog, Brooklyn Music


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