James Ford and Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco have spent the last decade cresting waves and skirting irrelevance to arrive at where they are today. After splintering from rock quartet Simian in 2005, Ford and Shaw turned toward the type of high-energy, melodically palatable electro that came to be known for a mercifully brief spell as “blog-house,” releasing one of the genre’s most colorful and striking full-lengths in the form of the 2007 debut Attack Decay Sustain Release.
The title of SMD’s 2009 follow-up, Temporary Pleasure, suggested the London duo’s dance-pop might be getting stale, so the following year saw them take a successful left turn into hard techno territory, launching the Delicatessen label and releasing an enjoyable batch of roilers in the form of that year’s singles collection Delicacies. At this point, SMD aren’t exactly underrated—their 2012 LP Unpatterns was a just-okay collision of their techno and electro tendencies—but their longevity has perhaps gone underappreciated, as recent collaborations with techno heavy-hitters like Irish duo Bicep and German veteran Roman Flügel have spoken to the duo’s adventurousness and steady sense of industry.
SMD's new album Whorl plays like an expected follow-up to the pleasantly forgettable Unpatterns rather than a confirmation of SMD’s still-revered live show. Much of the 64-minute set emphasizes texture over dynamics, content to exist as background music. This, in and of itself, is not the worst thing that could happen: Ford and Shaw are experts at the nuts and bolts of sound—the former is also an in-demand studio producer and songwriter—so the drifting ambience and analog burbles of Whorl are, like ice sculptures, glimmering in their plainness. The swirling, beatless one-two kiss of “Redshift” and “Dandelion Spheres” take on pleasing, meditative shapes, but the downtempo fare presented elsewhere—the frizzy, disjointed atmospherics of “Z Space”, “Nazard”’s questionable flirtations with chillout—simply dissipates upon contact.
As ever, SMD are most engaging when creating body-moving, uptempo fare: “Calyx” percolates and whines to a pleasing climax, with piping tones dancing on its surface, while “Tangents” builds to an anthemic swirl of synth lines anchored by a steady, hissing 4/4. Most notably, “Jam Side Up” rides a cascading melody for nearly six minutes, building and breaking a beat around it with a sense of patience that makes for an impressive mid-tune peak. These three tracks are clustered in the middle section of Whorl, possibly to mimic the structural build of a live performance, but the shiftless sounds that come before are more likely to trigger a click on "pause" rather than create anticipation for what’s to follow.
Just last year, SMD released Live, an untouchable document of their onstage capabilities that stands as their most pleasurable recorded statement. On Live they distilled their two primary modes—their harder, abstract side and their more explicitly pop-leaning past—into something cohesive and enjoyable, but the set also highlighted the duo’s Achilles heel: they’re more of a singles outfit (as many dance acts are) and when they’re constrained to the album format, tedium creeps in. That’s been the case since Temporary Pleasure, and it’s the case for Whorl, too, a record that finds SMD operating at half-speed when the accelerator is pedal is close within their reach.
