THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR

We get a lot of requests from artists, PR, managers and labels asking us to post music from bands that have already released several albums. We tend to turn them down, as this blog and the service it’s trying to provide is all about delivering new, emerging music to people. What good is it to recommend an artist you’ve already heard of, right? On the flip side, we’re not interested in desperately being first either, more that we’re only trying to be early to new music, so the readers genuinely discover something. Anything else makes the purpose of this blog a little bit redundant otherwise. However, today’s recommendation blurs the lines of these guiding rules, as they’re by no means new, yet we imagine there’ll be plenty of visitors to this page that have never discovered them. Additionally we think they’re pretty awesome too, which happens to be a slightly stricter rule we apply to anyone trying to get onto this blog’s posts, so they qualify on that front with ease.

The Polyamorous Affair are the duo, Eddie Chacon and Sissy Sainte-Marie, who used to live in Berlin but are now back living in their home town of Los Angeles. Beyond the questionable moniker – especially when you consider that they’re actually married – the American duo make music that is fixed on a brand of excellent moody disco that can pitch it’s tent alongside the likes of Goldfrapp, The Golden Filter, The Phenomenal Handclap Band and Escort. They’ve only enjoyed two low-key self-releases of a couple of albums previously, but none of these have enjoyed any kind of push over here in the UK. For their new album, The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be, we are set to see a fresh approach to Europe, which is fair and right, as their music should easily translate kindly to the ears of us Brits as much as anyone. Bobb Bruno of Best Coast has helped produce the new album, and as we know, this style of disco is always better off for having a tidy production involved.

They’re second single from the album is Whoever Controls The Groove which is due out on April 6th through Winter Palace Records, with remixes from Ghosting Season, Enjoyed and from fellow Recommendees, Bright Light Bright Light, the latter of which is provided below as an exclusive. The single stomps and claps as you would imagine a good contemporary disco tune should, although the opening vocal refrains wonder a little too close to The Scissor Sisters on occasion. What they do fantastically well is to hold onto the good bits for a decent section of a song – they let quality mantras and uplifting synths drive for more than 16 beats at a time, allowing the listener to hook onto the tune. Their songs follow similar templates throughout their albums, with Chacon and Saint-Marie sharing out the lyrics between them, but with the latter often offering up a huskier sexualised tone, much in the same way Goldfrapp or Fan Death do. We would grip them up for their lack of originality, as they add very little to any other modern purveyors of the genre, but fortunately they write so consistently well that their hypnotic powers seem to set up camp inside your brain and put up a sign saying “We shall not be moved“.

Older tracks, such as the low-key plod of Softer And Softer or the racing tap of tracks like Eastern showed us they have range to their armoury, but we fear they don’t push their horizons quite enough. Much like The Golden Filter they suffer from a singular tone which results in the kind of feeling you might associate with trying to go shopping for food when you’re full up – it’s simply impossible to decide what to like once your appetite has been satiated. It’s a lesson they could all learn from Goldfrapp, where light and shade is applied with far more contrast, to good effect. However, older highlights, such as the tune, New York, delivers a timeless class to their work, and it’s that quality that they’re now channelling with their new songs. Here’s a duo that seem to have learned from past successes and we now see them applying those lessons to the new album. Sticking to what you are best at may not herald much new ground, but it at least seems like a fair rule of quality. By applying a set of unwritten Recommender rules we are able to keep the blog’s aims on track and continue to be a useful service, but what’s perhaps been learned from today’s selection more than anything else is that some rules are more strictly applied over others – yeah sure, it helps to be new, but it helps so much more if you’re awesome. (MB)