I bought this album in New York City and listened to it for the first time while walking around Brooklyn on a cold afternoon three weeks ago. This went down without my realizing that Metro Area at present call the one-time "Fourth Largest City in America" home, but I wasn't surprised when I got back to Virginia a few days later and picked up the biographical details online. Metro Area is two guys, producers Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani, who've been working together since the mid-90s. Beginning in 1999, they released a string of highly sought-after and limited 12-inch singles on their own Environ label. And now we have their first full-length, which collects edited versions of six of those 12-inch sides, in addition to new material.
Even in my ignorance, with nothing to go on but enthusiastic recommendations from a few people I respect, Metro Area seemed the perfect soundtrack to an afternoon stroll through the brownstones. This is city music through and through; Metro Area's musical history is one of confined spaces, close proximity, and mingled breath, a world drawn from and immersed in club culture. These sounds have no place on the front porch or in the car deck.
Beginning their musical references around 1977, Metro Area combine heavy doses of disco, dollops of funk, a dash of new wave and synth-pop, and then remove just about everything but each track's most essential elements. It's no surprise that one of the best tracks here, the plucky and P-funkish "Miura", wound up on Force Tracks' recent Digital Disco compilation (well worth checking out, by the way).
Despite the association with some of the microhouse mavens and a shared commitment to musical economy, Metro Area carries no theoretical baggage aboard this plane. These guys would never allow a glitch to sully their pristine productions. They're more interested in the warmth of the picked nylon string guitar (on the Latin shuffle "Piña"), the purity of the flute (the almost painfully funky "Machine Vibes") and the timeless swell of horns ("Orange Alert"). The Kelley Polar String Quartet appears on three tracks, imparting rhythmic stabs, romantic swells, and melodramatic sweeps, all hallmarks of the disco tradition. The care taken in recording and balancing the organic instruments pays off in spades and gives Metro Area an edge over the Reaktor and Cubase set. This is beautifully recorded and endlessly rhythmic music.
Actually, these tracks sound so nice and draw so masterfully from a variety of dance music traditions that I can't help but wish Metro Area would incorporate some vocals into the mix. It's not that the tracks don't work well on their own-- you can certainly absorb all the delicious space and admire the rhythmic interplay better this way-- but some of these chord productions and beats are just too pop to leave the voice out entirely. It's almost scary to think how good they could be in that context. It's not hard to imagine a couple of these six-minute plus tracks, which drag just a tad by the end as they repeat themselves (forgivable when you consider many were created with DJs in mind), seeming too short with a few verses added. Still, though I dream about Metro Area paying homage to disco's vocal pop history, I really have very little to complain about. First rate.
