Hercules And Love Affair - Blue Songs
- Written by Greg Salter
Many listeners were drawn to Hercules And Love Affair’s celebratory self-titled 2008 debut for the opportunity to hear Antony Hegarty in a new context – when the sparse, melancholy I Am A Bird Now landed, seemingly out of nowhere in 2005, the last place you’d expect him to crop up was on a disco revival record. Not only did he flourish in this new environment, belting out the aching opener ‘Time Will’ and standout and instant classic ‘Blind’ amongst others, but he sounded more than comfortable. Fortunately for Hercules And Love Affair, all the people who came for Antony stayed to bask in a dance record of rare consistency and bittersweet euphoria.
Blue Songs initially ‘suffers’, if you can use that word in this case, from having two particularly strong tracks at the front of the record. On ‘Painted Eyes’, Negrot soars over the pulsing house beats and strings asking, “how can you know always?” – it’s like one of those It Gets Better videos in epic, irresistible music form. Meanwhile, lead single ‘My House’ initially comes across as pure throwback, but all the house references are dead on and Wright’s elastic, androgynous vocals have you forgetting Antony. Together, they’re an ideal update to what Butler and his crew have done before, while their melodic energy begs you to skip back to start to listen again and again.
While the rest of Blue Songs is a little less immediate, it rewards repeated listens and reveals new sides to Hercules And Love Affair. ‘Answers Come In Dreams’ pulses with Butler’s intricate, detailed musical backdrop while ‘The Visitor’ is an ominous, future-disco gem. Elsewhere, ‘Boy Blue’ brings acoustic strums to the mix, with Wright crooning lyrics that, according to Butler, were written in tribute to Sinead O’Connor when he was younger. Okereke is no doubt someone who could identify with that song’s “young boy blue” character (the last couple of Bloc Party albums were like listening to someone’s extended growing pains in song, culminating in his still-awkward solo record last year). His appearance on ‘Step Up’ is his most convincing foray into dance culture yet, though he can’t rival the vocals of Wright and Negrot.
A lot has been written about the nostalgic aspects of Blue Songs, with many critics criticising Butler for regurgitating his influences so perfectly. What I think is important to remember about Blue Songs, and Butler’s Hercules And Love Affair project in general, is that it engages with a particularly turbulent but also celebratory period of queer culture – it is music that reflects not just Butler’s personal history, but that of many other men and women. This isn’t just nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake (and we all know there’s more than enough of that in independent music at the moment) but more of a kind of ongoing remaking of the past anew. It sounds like a personal history being formed and reformed though music. That Hercules And Love Affair manage to achieve this with consistently great pop songs is no mean feat.