Renaissance Recordings

Brace yourselves, Hercules fans. While this valuable back catalogue of DFA DJ Andy Butler’s favorite disco and house cuts smacks of “Raise Me Up” (one of many highlights from Hercules’ self-titled 2008 debut), there’s only one Love Affair exclusive to be found on this double-disc set. “I Can’t Wait”, a sparse house track featuring the laconic femme vocals of neither Kim Ann nor Nomi (or for that matter, Antony), drags on through vibrating backing arrangements of dirty synths as the chorus repeats, “I won’t bear this cross, I won’t wear these chains.” The remaining tracks recount Butler’s love of Euro-dance, The Clash, and Italo-disco, a collision of styles that gets the party started. Take the boldfaced In Flagranti’s “I Never Screwed Around Before”, in which Butler decoupages Joe Strummer over a La Bouche-esque beat; punk meets house only to get sideswiped in drama. But while Butler wears his influences close to his chest (there’s no Aoki-ing around with these samples), Sidetracked remains a well-executed exercise in curation. Consider it Butler’s immaculate collection, closing with the lushest, pearliest confection of house disco yet: Rainbow Team’s “Dreaming”, which soars to heights even Antony can’t reach.

What's Your Rapture?

Sweden’s Love Is All made indie-philes quiver with their 2006 debut Nine Times the Same Song, a frenetic party-crasher that delivered perfect punky breakup anthems in three minutes flat. With cymbals that clatter and fall, bristling synthesizers, and the crazed vocals of Josephine Olausson (who sounds like The Concretes’ Victoria Bergsman covering new-wave chanteuse Cristina), A Hundred Things buzzes with a broken heart stomped out all over the dance floor. But when a saxophone teases out nursery-rhyme melodies on the slowburner “Giants Fall”, it could be Jesus and Mary Chain headlining a high school battle of the bands.

Photography by Marcus Palmqvist

In England, they breed their pop ingénues big-haired and boozy, apt to trash their exes with intimate details of drug habits and dodgy new girlfriends. In America, they strap on a Fender Strat and jump around the strip mall. In Sweden, however, they take the high road. Twenty-two-year-old Stockholm singer Lykke Li calls her songs “spaces”. Her full-length debut, Youth Novels, measures the glacial intensity that made her compatriots the Concretes and the Shout Out Louds so fun to eat meatballs to. And it boasts a transcontinental dance flair. Li grew up on the mountaintops of Portugal with two hippie parents before moving to a windowless apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, at the age of nineteen to perform at open mike nights, to no avail. “I was a young skinny white girl without a clue about anything the first time I was in New York, so it was kind of a disaster,” Li admits. “My nickname was Blanquita and my friend got eggs thrown at her because she was white. We had no heat in the apartment even though it was December, so I slept with two jackets on.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.