- When Simian Mobile Disco's electro pop, collab-happy last album was released in 2009, few noticed that it also came with a limited edition second CD that included exclusive Carl Craig-like technoid instrumental excursions. But if you've seen them live in the past two years, you might also have noticed how James Ford and Jas Shaw, while playing around their circular setting of gears and wires, perfectly understood the proper dynamics of a dance floor. On Delicacies, their most recent long player unleashed on their own label of the same name, the British duo makes good use of its expertise while surprisingly succeeding at changing the very image they carefully built since they started to work as a dance duo almost a decade ago.
Compared to ultra catchy tracks such as "Hustler" or "Audacity of Huge," the stuff on Delicacies doesn't seem like a step forward or backward, but rather like a step aside: SMD have left the guest vocalists outside the studio and decided to focus instead on strict functionality. In that regard, album opener "Aspic" couldn't be more illustrative of this readjustment. "Casu Marzu" is as sonically extensive, making adroit use of huge-sounding pads, while "Hakarl" is restless and relentless; they even add mechanized samples and acidic motifs towards the end for added thrills. This is as close as they probably will ever get to pulling a Robert Hood on their fans. And it actually fits them quite well. Sure, "Thousand Year Egg" and "Skin Cracker" might closely revisit the tense sonorities already explored on older productions like "Sleep Deprivation" and "10,000 Horses Can't Be Wrong," but you can also tell they have been realized with peak time functionality instead of glossy YouTube video in mind.
On CD 2, the same tracks are simply reorganized and blended together for an hour-long mix, just to corroborate how harmoniously they perform in the context of a DJ set. Incidentally, last October, the duo also released Is Fixed, a mixed compilation for NYC imprint Defend Music on which they confessed their love for Etienne Jaumet, Paul Woolford and Pantha Du Prince, furthering the distance between them and the so-called electro house scene they have been so closely associated with in the past. With Delicacies, Simian Mobile Disco continues to explore new avenues, and this carefully revised sense of purpose is as unexpected as it is refreshing.
TracklistCD 1: Unmixed
01. Aspic
02. Nerve Salad
03. Casu Marzu
04. Thousand Year Egg
05. Skin Cracker
06. Hakarl
07. Sweetbread
08. Ortolan
09. Fugu
CD 2: Mixed
01. Sweetbread
02. Hakarl
03. Nerve Salad
04. Casu Marzu
05. Skin Cracker
06. Aspic
07. Thousand Year Egg Drumapella
08. Ortolan