Recently, turntablists DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist have been engaging in a series of Future Primitive Sound Sessions whereat they spin only 45s, and fellow DJ Peanut Butter Wolf has been releasing the seven-inch wonders on his Stone's Throw label. Now Ben Ayres and Tjinder, the two main blokes from Cornershop (a group whose notoriety can be attributed to the song "A Brimful of Asha," its prescient paean to 45s and bosoms), have attempted to flip the spirit of the 45 into Clinton, a side project built on dance beats from the ages and named for the nation's most prominent elderly mack this side of Bob Barker.
Clinton's debut album, Disco and the Halfway to Discontent, is disco in the same way "Rapper's Delight" was disco (and if you don't believe me, just check out the Sugarhill Gang's video). Or perhaps it's closer to Blondie's new-wave/hip-hop curiosities "Step Into a World" and "Rapture." Its beats range all over the place; the first three songs progressively kick up the BPMs, starting with a hip-hop drum-and-snare shuffle and moving on up to that subtechno disco kick. The music is not so much about the drums, though; no, you'll do better to take in the hand claps on "People Power in the Disco Hour" or the video-game effects and vocoder in "Hip Hop Bricks," the vampy horns and disco sirens in "Buttoned Down Disco" or the keyboard effects in "The Hot for May Sound" (the likes of which were formerly available only on import from France via Dmitri From Paris albums).
Pardon the laundry list, but what gets stirred into a nice blended bouillabaisse on, say, a good Beck track, sounds like a cavalcade of gimmicks here. Clinton doesn't lack for musical ability, and I could scarcely fault anyone for a Galaga sample, but cataloging different dance sounds doesn't cut it when you offer up little more than rehashed vocoder shout-out tracks as filler. Perhaps the robotic voice on "Hip Hop Bricks," which at least has the good sense to give props to Kool Keith, should get together with the maladjusted drone from Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" and Stephen Hawking and have a fab electric conversation.
Disco and the Halfway to Discontent may remind you of an acquaintance you like in spite of your better judgment. "People Power in the Disco Hour" stands as a great low-wattage funky anthem. "Hip Hop Bricks," apart from the gimmicks, does have a lot of fun sound effects going on. Lyrics of whimsy accompany the beat-driven music. Purportedly, the album follows a theme of taking dance and discotheque energy out into the actual world, but the lyrical content of the album tends more toward slice-of-consciousness diatribes on the dance floor accompanied by the occasional rave-as-reaction-to-screwy-society platitude. (On "The Hot for May Sound," we hear "Why should relations / Think us insane? Dropping the bomb," a glib commentary on the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race). Some standout tracks are less directly beat-driven and sound like something you may have heard on a Cornershop album. "David D. Chambers," with its looped and fractured scratching, immediately brought to my mind "Butter the Soul," from Cornershop's acclaimed When I Was Born for the 7th Time. Sadly, the norm is more like "The Hot for May Sound," which features a nice enough beat that slowly grows tiresome when dragged out into an instrumental track for no good reason.
Ultimately, you could throw most of the tracks from the album on the dance floor and rock the crowd. In terms of a cohesive album, however, Disco and the Halfway to Discontent makes it only -- you guessed it -- halfway there. Though disco does live on in mutated forms in the wide range of today's electronic music, Clinton's debut falls short of capturing its exact essence.
Eric Solomon | February 15, 2000
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