Three years after the Rapture invented dancing, most guitar-based music still isn't great to dance to. Each passing wave of post-punk revivalists has tended to excel more at spiky guitars and big hooks than starting new dance crazes. Bands like LCD Soundsystem and TV on the Radio are as fun for their music crit and high-concept harmonies, respectively, as for their rhythms. That's all just another reason why we need Justin Timberlake.
Meanwhile, it's been 17 years since the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses made a city go Mad, and fellow townsfolk Working for a Nuclear City, thankfully, have long memories. Like early Roses or Screamadelica-era Primal Scream, WfaNFC purvey a druggy amalgam of rave, rock, and pop, generous with block-rockin' breakbeats, full-body bass grooves, and crystalline dream-pop comedowns. The blissed-out guitar drones of shoegazers like Slowdive strobe-light the fog-machine air. Throw in vintage Lou Reed and you'd have Trainspotting 2006: Choose Waking Life.
Fortunately, the Mancunian quartet's self-titled debut doesn't stop at nostalgia: Like contemporary electro-rockers Caribou, 120 Days, or Fujiya & Miyagi, WfaNFC prove adroit Teutonic disciples for the krautrock throb at the center of kaleidoscopic "Troubled Son", while "Innocence" pretty much has an anxiety attack at a Chemical Brothers video shoot. Singer/bassist Ed Hulme's deadpan surrealism on "Dead Fingers Walking" leads one to wonder why, say, Beck isn't fronting such cocky, cockeyed should-be club anthems. It's psychedelic dance music for a generation that prefers liquor.
Nor are WfaNFC content to stop at beat-laden soundscapes. The slower four-to-the-floor of synth-chiming "Quiet Places" conjures memory reflected in the tranquility of "a hiding place beneath blue skies," gently tugging at old aches. Too-brief "England" masks terse radicalism in swooning harmonies. "Home" uses ambient noise and scratchy acoustic guitars to elevate a sing-songy bummer into a tiny, poignant miracle, while "Fallout" exhales like Air's spaciest, and "Forever" veers into a bell-ringing motorik raga. As a whole, the album sounds as good on damp sidewalks as its faster parts would in a dance club.
Intoxication aside, WfaNFC's debut has nothing in common with the hippies the band's name might imply. In fact, the phrase comes from a sign near Piccadilly Station in Manchester, a "City of Peace" that recently celebrated its 25th year of, uh, an underworked city council declaring the place a "nuclear free zone." Yeah, but what's that in the water? If it's not the bomb, then it's love that will tear us apart.
