For once I haven't pixelated or re-drawn the cover in a Ceefax style, as I want to talk about it at the start of this review and how it is a perfect window into what to expect on Too Slow To Disco from DJ Supermarkt.
Its grainy over-saturated blue sky, the iconic palm tree, the almost certainly 5-Star hotel in the bottom left-hand corner, indicates endless sunshine, convertible gas-guzzlers and a disregard for thinking too far into the future. We're in California, we're in the mid-70s and we're in the world of expensive funk-infused soft-rock, which has been re-evaluated and re-tagged as 'Yacht Rock' by crate diggers, record labels and taste-makers. We're talking The Doobie Brothers, Chicago, and Fleetwood Mac.
No longer verboten thanks initially to the rise of the widely successful Guilty Pleasures series and extensive sampling by Lemon Jelly in the early 2000s, this style of music has truly come in from the cold and into the warm embrace of hipsters through its influence on blog favourites such as Ariel Pink and Phoenix and to a certain extend on Daft Punk's ubiquitous Random Access Memories. This isn't even the first such compilation of yacht rock with Late Night Tales getting in on the act in 2012 with Music For Pleasure from Groove Armada's Tom Findlay (indeed Ned Doheny's Get It Up For Love appears on both mixes).
So let's put on our classics and have a little dance shall we? Except as explicitly stated in the title, the music on offer in Too Slow To Disco tends to chug along rather that strut, it's laid back rather than upfront, a piña colada rather than a Jägerbomb. And as with a night of just drinking elaborate fruity cocktails, the sugary sweetness and slick concoctions can leave you craving something with a little bit of grit or bite to cleanse the palate and means this compilation at times becomes too much of a good thing.
While Too Slow To Disco collates some interesting tracks (Browning Bryant's Liverpool Fool, Brian Elliot's Room To Grow, and Don Brown's Shut The Door) and has a solid ideological backbone, there are no exclusive edits or remixes on offer, so one could cut and paste this together if you so wish. Yet doing so would mean you'd be missing out on a beautifully assembled package (the LP version comes in a 2 x 180g yellow vinyl gatefold set-up) and I hope some weighty and witty liner notes (I'm reviewing a mp3 bundle of the album).
I for one will keep an eye out for volume two.
****
The vinyl version comes out Saturday 19th April 2014, while the CD and download versions are released on Monday 5th May 2014. T-Shirt bundles are available for pre-order now.
