Shoegaze tends to take place in wide open spaces, but on his first album as Moon King, 2015’s Secret Life, Daniel Benjamin imagined what it might sound like in miniature. Songs like “Apocalypse” offered up the same skyward yearning heard among Slowdive and Ride, but toned down the eruptions of bass and reverb. Moon King’s latest genre exercise also takes place in a narrow channel, only this time Benjamin fixes his sights on classic disco.
Inspired by a recent move to Detroit, Hamtramck ’16 is an EP-length collection of experiments hewn close to the shadow of Giorgio Moroder—so close that the bassline of opener “Come Around” is taken directly from Moroder’s 1977 hit with Donna Summer, “I Feel Love.” Rather than use that riff as a springboard for a similar exploration of space and texture, Benjamin lets it loop flatly in the foreground. The vibe isn’t dance floor transcendence; with Benjamin’s nasal voice and flanged-out guitars, it’s more indie brooding hour, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Multi-Love dialed down a notch or two.
Like generations of disco before it, Hamtramck ’16 situates boundless, unrequited desire against a rock-solid four on the floor backbeat. The way Benjamin vocalizes that desire, though, tends to feel a little rote. “Darlin’, I’ve been thinkin about you for a while/But I’m dreaming alone,” he sings on “Jasmine,” a combination of words you can imagine sitting among the scraps of many lyric books before it. Other lines, like those on the record’s most fun and flexible track “In & Out,” can be hard to make out through the reverb wash applied to his voice, forcing a disconnect between singer and listener. That ambiguity can work fine in genres like shoegaze or for bands like Radiohead, where the focus is not by any means the lyrics, but it leaves a vacancy here in disco, which, like most dance genres, demands a certain intimacy, or at least an acknowledgement that the dancer is being spoken to.
Instead, it often feels like Benjamin is murmuring to himself. Hamtramck ’16 rings too flat and tinny to sound like it could survive on a dance floor with other people on it. The treble’s oddly overpowered in the mix, and the drum machines tend to loom and clatter over everything else. On closer “Ordinary Lover,” a loud piano riff enters about 15 seconds in and doesn’t leave or change until the song ends. That’s four solid minutes of the same three piano chords at the same level, no breaks, no variance. It’s exhausting enough that I don’t even have the gusto to complain about how the chorus of the song goes, “I don’t want no ordinary lover/I don’t want no ordinary love.”
Disco never died, and even LCD Soundsystem came back from the grave. But it needs more than a rippling analog bassline and a few pairs of boots and cats to really thrive. Throughout Hamtramck ’16, I'm hungry for a couplet as delightfully strange and biting as Anohni’s on Hercules and Love Affair’s “Time Will”: “I cannot hold a half a life/I cannot be a half a wife.” I want figures to recede into the distance and come back twice as strong. I want anything close to the way Donna Summer whispers “ooh, it’s so good” like a sacred incantation. At its best and fullest, disco moves and breathes and dances like a whole body. Hamtramck ’16 walks more like an aspirational skeleton.
