Eurodisco — at its worst the nursery that coddled the Eurotrash culture of the ’80s, at its best the fountainhead for some of the lustiest, most bizarrely pulsating cyborg dance tunes in history. Ninety-eight percent of these transcontinental oddities remain submerged in club-music backwaters where they belong, but the genius on tracks like “Supernature,” by French outfit Cerrone, and “From Here to Eternity,” by Italian-born German producer Giorgio Moroder, are rightfully resurfacing to inspire the risky disco of today. Disco Nouveau is an assemblage of underground electro artists resetting their drum machines from “syncopated and twitchy” to “throbbing and metronomic” for some of the nastiest, campiest four-to-the-floor cuts of the year.
By throwing convention to the wind and expanding on the relatively unexploited Eurodisco blueprint, quite a few of the artists here strike gold. Lowfish of the underrated Canadian label Suction submits an out-and-out classic with “No Longer Accepting Complaints,” which contains a cascading synth line that makes hair stand on end. Other instrumental standouts include Daniel Wang’s uptempo stomach-churner “Pistol Orderso” and Legowelt’s laser-zapping P-Funked roller jam “Disco Rout.” But no Eurodisco tribute would be complete without female vocalists who garble English lyrics like English was their fourth language — along these lines we have I-f’s collaboration with Nancy Fortune “Holographic Voice,” Adult’s “Nite Life,” and DMX featuring Tracy’s aerobics anthem “Make Me.” (Some of the accents might be a tad affected — Adult’s singer Nicola Kuperus for one is American.) Without any throwaway tracks and plenty of remarkable ones, Disco Nouveau is the exception to the rule of warmed-over electronic music compilations.
