Decade-defying, dance-inducing electronic music has always been LCD Soundsystem’s signature calling card and it’s an ethos that obviously extends to the latest collaborative project from founding member Pat Mahoney and The Juan MacLean’s Dennis McNany.
Dubbed Museum of Love, the duo channels a glimmering discotheque groove with a brand of electro-punk funk that’ll be familiar to any diehard DFA fan. Case and point is the latest offering from their upcoming self-titled LP called “In Infancy,” which combines the best of signature DFA-esque distortions with a dash of whimsical wonk and transcendental swoop. Filled with scuzzy synths, croon-embracing choir vocals and an unstoppable drum machine, it’s a shimmering, funk-loving spin on the duo’s past musical endeavors as groove-inducing, avant-electro staples.
Relaxing in its hazy dance floor drift, “In Infancy” coddles your ears. Swaddled by sweeping angelic harmonics gradually melting into an ethereal polyphony of sound, it invokes a series of blissful ideas content in their otherworldly leanings. But that’s not to say it lacks direction, as the entire track is driven by an incessant beat that could make even the sourest of four-on-the-floor adherents sway back and forth a bit. And it should, as it’s a gentle disco-influenced lullaby for the glamorous, cowbell-obsessed embryo within you.
The heir apparent to the Human League’s brand of decade-straddling balladry, it’s as if Mahoney and McNany squeezed all of the disco-embracing essence lingering within MTV’s New Wave playlists from between 1977 and 1983 and put it all into one genre-spanning track. And while some purists may argue otherwise, in all honesty, what better time in musical dance history is there to distill? After all, tracks that glide through time, space and external dimensions are the backbone of pop music. And in my opinion, it’s all for the better if this post-modern dance-punk can turn into something as fun and surprising as “In Infancy.”
