Hercules and Love Affair

At the Royal Unicorn on Saturday, April 12

There’s the type of disco everyone knows about, the kind people had in mind when they started wearing Disco Sucks T-shirts back in the late ’70s. That’s the disco of the Village People and the Bee Gees—the campy soundtrack to countless wedding receptions, and the musical equivalent of an open-necked, leopard-print polyester shirt. Then there’s the disco practically no one ever talks about, the primal, body-driven sound that links funk and soul to hip-hop in the grand continuum of African-American genres. That’s the music made by and for people who were considered outcasts back then—gays, ethnic minorities, and all-around freaks who generally give nightclubs their pulse.

It’s that latter kind of disco Andrew Butler has in mind when he’s producing as Hercules and Love Affair—aimed not at the coke-dusted noses in the VIP section but at the sweat-soaked torso of every dancer in the room. The New Yorker’s self-titled debut album is one of two recent reappraisals of the disco sound. Where its counterpart, Kelley Polar’s I Need You to Hold On While the Sky Is Falling, channels Giorgio Moroder’s flamboyant cosmic-pop, Hercules and Love Affair connects the intricacies of Arthur Russell–style art-disco to the jacking brutality of early Chicago house music.

When, about 15 minutes into his DJ set last Saturday at the Royal Unicorn, Butler played his biggest track to date, “Blind”, there erupted such a rush to the dance floor that the only place left for people to go was up—as in off their feet, fists raised, singing along. The song, which features an indelible vocal turn from Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) is a Top 40 hit in Great Britain—and a galloping slab of musculature that demands to be listened to with the entire body. The crowd, a collection of achingly hip Unicorn regulars and old-school dance purists, submitted willingly, faces radiating beatific satisfaction that would last well into Sunday morning.

Butler isn’t a particularly great DJ, but what he lacks in mixing skills he makes up for with an encyclopedic knowledge of ’70s- and ’80s-era alt-dance, playing hits and should-have-been-hits by obscure artists with names like Opium Monks and the Erotic Drum Band. To those vintage tunes, the Denver native added some of his own productions, a track by corevivalists Metro Area, and a period remix of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” that had peacocks voguing for the benefit of all, but mostly for themselves. For the first time in what seems like a decade, this reviewer didn’t spot any cameras in the room, didn’t witness a single picture being snapped and then immediately ogled by its subjects. For once, the people of Vancouver seemed too blissfully caught up in their bodies to worry about photographing them.