SG Lewis: Times review – soaring, subtle disco for kitchen dancefloors
Recently, the assorted social media feeds of singer-songwriter-producer SG Lewis have provided up every thing from tutorials on recording strategies to dwell streams throughout which Lewis shows his skill to down cans of lager in a single. In between, comes proof of Lewis’s obsession with disco, for which he has evidently fallen laborious.
There are glowing suggestions for Tim Lawrence’s magisterial guide Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970-79. There are movies of the British producer flicking by means of disco 12-inches in a secondhand report store and clips of him interviewing Alex Rosner, the genial, pipe-smoking designer of the sound programs at legendary 70s NY golf equipment the Loft and the Gallery, whose voice seems over tinkling synth arpeggios on Times’s transient instrumental Rosner’s Interlude. And there are screenshots of messages from Nile Rogers, who makes an look on his single One More. Indeed, the unique title of Lewis’s album was the Chic-derived Good Times, earlier than the adjective was lopped off, presumably when it grew to become obvious that calling an album Good Times would appear unnecessarily sarcastic given the present state of the world.
You may say there’s one thing horribly ironic about releasing an album knowledgeable by disco’s communal hedonism in early 2021, no matter its title. There’s definitely one thing just a little bizarre about listening to Lewis’s description of Times as “an ode to the present moment and the finite chances we have to celebrate it”, when the current second feels each interminable and numbingly repetitious. And but, Times additionally arrives at a bizarrely opportune level: disco is having one in all its common moments, manifested in every single place from Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia to Victoria Monét’s Experience – each that includes Lewis – in addition to Doja Cat’s Say So, the video for BTS’s Dynamite, and a plethora of thinkpieces ranging in tone from celebratory to hand-wringing. If Lewis’s perception that his album may soundtrack a summer season of post-lockdown festivals and raves appears optimistic, the truth that its pure surroundings stays shut for the foreseeable clearly isn’t a barrier to its potential success.
Times’s contents underline what Experience already advised: whether or not it’s right down to his immersion within the unique period or a pure affinity for making it, Lewis is de facto expert at producing disco-infused pop-house. Instead of overloading tracks with apparent, high-camp disco signifiers, his expertise lies in subtle touches.
The pretty backing of Time, paying homage to late-90s basic Music Sounds Better With You, is woven with a fantastically muted orchestral association and understated snatches of vocal samples (taken, it seems, from Dennis Edwards’s Don’t Look Any Further); the largely instrumental Back to Earth is adorned with a restrained however nagging woodwind motif. The lyrics of One More key right into a longstanding custom of bittersweet songs about fleeting disco romance, and convey the sense that Lewis is aware of the dancefloor intimately. For all that it is likely to be aimed on the charts and the Radio 1 A-list, Times’s tracks carry a definite tang of actuality. The hovering analogue synth tones of Chemicals, courtesy of the Neptunes’s Chad Hugo, underline the tune’s depiction of a celebration coming into full chaotic swing; Canadian singer Rhye’s blurred-but-elated vocal on Time captures the fuzzy unreality of daybreak after an evening out.
Lewis is much less assured when he strikes away from his disco blueprint. There’s nothing unsuitable precisely with the ballady Heartbreak on the Dancefloor or the extra straightforwardly pop-facing Impact, that includes Robyn, however they really feel much less distinguished than the tracks that encompass them. And his personal vocals are noticeably much less distinctive than these of his friends, a state of affairs amplified by the truth that he appears to lack confidence in them: each time he takes to the microphone, he appears to crank up the Auto-Tune.
But these are issues you sense he may crack in time. Lewis has talked concerning the contents of his debut album present process a sure circumstantial repurposing as world occasions overtook them: supposed to create sweaty small-hours euphoria, they at present need to perform as music that transports the listener from their environment, nevertheless briefly. You can see how the slowly constructing electronics of All We Have or the Syndrum explosions of Feed the Fire is likely to be potentiated by being heard at excessive quantity in the course of a crowd however, equally, they’re sturdy sufficient songs to resist being taken out of context, so as to add a second of sparkly exhilaration to a Friday night that entails nothing extra thrilling than turning up Spotify within the kitchen.
This week Alexis listened to
Exum: Dark Kept Secret
Neon-haired former skilled American footballer turns his hand to softly psychedelic androgynous pop, full with dance-like-no-one-is-watching choreography. Whatever subsequent?
• This review was amended on 18 February 2021: Times is launched on EMI/PMR, not Virgin/PMR as beforehand said.
