The Juan MacLean, aka John MacLean, has been with the DFA since the beginning. In many ways, his story is the story of the label itself. Much like DFA's core group, LCD Soundsystem, the ex-Six Finger Satellite musician came to dance music from an indie/punk rock background. He released a string of well-received 12"s-- his first predating LCD's breakout "Losing My Edge" and beaten onto the tracks only by the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers"-- before eventually maturing into a solid album artist. These transitions from rock to electronic, and from DJ-oriented 12" to albums, are also the tensions that animate the label.
With that in mind, it's been interesting to see how MacLean has responded to releasing one of the label's strongest, and perhaps least expected albums, 2009's The Future Will Come. First, he offered the house classicism of his 2010 DJ-Kicks mix; now we have the previously released odds-and-ends of Everybody Get Close, a collection that both dimly mirrors Future and shows MacLean stretching into the production of more faceless but more functional dance tracks.
Like The Future Will Come, this record's varied electro tracks are anchored by one awesome 10-minute workout. Here it's "Feel So Good"-- with its endlessly building house pianos, rolling background percussion, and Nancy Whang's clipped come-ons, it almost reads like a dub version of his 2008 single "Happy House". (In fact, it makes the actual version of "Happy House" that's included here-- an alternately wan and annoying nu-Balearic rework by Cut Copy-- feel more superfluous than it already is.)
Two remixes of Future's lone ballad "Human Disaster" appear as well-- the Holmes Price version holds onto MacLean's regretful singing and heavy, hanging piano chords, but sets them against trilling synths and an old-school electro beat; Jee Day smears the piano chords into a haze of reverb then brings them back as a muffled loop that echoes the triplet pattern of "Happy House" amid an unnecessarily busy rhythm track. The album is bookended with the two cuts that sound most like Future B-sides, the vocal electro of "Find a Way" and its vocodered echo "Everybody Get Close".
The tracks that fare best are those that veer furthest away from Future's Human League-meets-house template. For instance, "Let's Talk About Me" is a squealing, percolating acid track with pitched-up vocals reminiscent of Zomby's "Fuck Mixing, Let's Dance" (and therefore of a whole swath of circa 1992 rave). "X2" is a dark, sonar-pinging track that could pass for Shit Robot. "Deviant Device" is a floating bit of dubby ambient techno that slowly unfolds over nine minutes to become one of the most enjoyable tracks on the collection.
Sadly, Everybody Get Close doesn't function as a benchmark of MacLean's between-album progress, as it collects tracks dating back at far as four years. Some of these feel like scraps and sketches, others like the B-sides they are-- which is fine when the scraps are this frequently exciting-- but given the range of his output so far, what would be most satisfying would be to get a glimpse of where MacLean's heading next.
