Way back in 2002, Simian was a UK indie rock outfit with four members and a second album being produced by Brian Eno. Simian loved Prince and were featured on a record of covers of the purple sex god. In 2005 the band split and two members, James Ellis Ford and James Anthony Shaw, formed a new dance/remix group. Around the same time, now world-famous French electro-house act Justice remixed Simian's Never Be Alone, which may still be the number one epic-club-banger three years later.
As a disco act, SMD have made a name for themselves by remixing everyone from Björk to the Klaxons. However, Attack Decay Sustain Release, their first full-length recording, contains all original material.
The on the new album songs are skin-tight disco grooves built around clever hooks. Bass, synth, drums, vocals, and noise work together to reference the 80s without humor or overt repetition. Though it remains a consistent complaint about the entire disco genre, the emotional resonance in SMD's is lacking and the album does not really sound like a complete narrative. There are amazing tracks to be had (at least three tracks that I play regularly at parties I DJ), but ingenious production values and brilliant pop-rave sensibility cannot save Attack Decay Sustain Release from the glittering mechanical menace that is digital pop music. I love the record, but we could never make it past a first month of dates, bars, and DJ sets. I need more of a drawn-out love story.
Naively, I want Simian Mobile Disco to be a band that brings disco into the streets and fields of villages and towns. Literally, I want a new disco moment of mobile outdoor disco. Some of SMD's press photos feature what appear to be a makeshift rooftop disco, but I wonder to what extent my new rave fantasies are flimsy dreams cooked up by talented NME provocateurs. Though there have been numerous rumors and reports of a contemporary outdoor rave scene in the UK, I have never talked to anyone who has been to one.
Club music, especially disco, relies so heavily on the city regulation of alcohol sales that I fear the mobile disco concept may never catch on in America suburbs. My dreams of dancing to Daft Punk in the vacant parking lots of outer Pasadena are slowly, rationally shattered. Interestingly, the video for the SMD single "I Believe" seems to allude to populist disco in poorer parts of Europe, though the exact location for that video shoot is unclear to me.