UK tech-house duo Swayzak's third album goes out of its way to obscure what they're best at. On their 1998 debut, Snowboarding in Argentina, James Taylor and David Brown forged nine gleaming ingots of silicon-based, dub-leaning techno. DJs like Mr. C and Terry Francis spun tracks like "Bueno" and "Fukumachi", and effectively made Swayzak the cat's meow of tech-house. That album's success lent the duo the credit and credibility to expand their horizons; their follow-up, Himawari, featured guest slots from dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah and former Opus III vocalist Kirsty Hawkshaw. But while it retained some of its predecessor's gleam, it too often settled for transient pop. Dirty Dancing now finds Swayzak pursuing the latest flavor-of-the-month-- electroclash-- even more vigorously.
Clearly, Swayzak would like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Fischerspooner, Adult., and Ladytron. Himawari, in acidic electro-jams like "Mysterons" and "State of Grace", included traces of this sound before it become a phenomenon-- isn't it only fair they should scoop up some of the acclaim? Well, frankly, no. While it's not torture to listen to Dirty Dancing repeatedly, it does contain more than its rightful share of slip-ups and missteps. To be fair, Swayzak's take on electroclash opts to rubs noses with John Selway's innovative style, rather than certain acts' slap-dashed approximations of Speak and Spell-era Depeche Mode. The opener, "Make Up You Mind", grafts a minimal techno rhythm track onto jaunty electro-pop, as guest vocalist Clair Dietrich bobs and weaves her adenoidal Sarah Cracknell impersonation through gleaming sheets of cool German ambience and Jackmaster Funk bass bounces. And Swayzak relate the murderous tale of "Buffalo Seven", as narrated by Alan Vega's doppelganger Klaus Kotai, with similar panache.
"In the Car Crash", however, is the first sign of Swayzak falling back on an electroclash cliché-- it's yet another adaptation of The Normal's J.G. Ballard-worshipping "Warm Leatherette". But this track can't add anything to its subgenre; "Warm Leatherette" said it all, as starkly and as chillingly as possible. The duo goes as far as to soften and romanticize its inspiration's most inhumanly fucked-up, mechanical porno lyric, by exchanging, "The handbrake penetrates your thigh," for, "Face through the window/ But you're always on my mind." It's an honest effort, but for my money, the closer you can get to the amoral essence of Ballard's novel Crash, the more visceral and provocative the effect. The Normal understood this, and presented its mechanical erotica without feeling or judgment. "In the Car Crash" is a Merchant Ivory reading of the same story.
The instrumental "Celsius" returns to Chicago house for inspiration, and glossies the groove with some nods to Orbital, but "I Dance Alone", a duet between Adult.'s Nicola Kuperus and Carl Finlow, is the album's most egregious electroclash moment. With a fuzzed-out bass, Kuperus' blank shouting, and Finlow's pining refrain, it stands as Swayzak's bid for a hit the size of Fischerspooner's "Emerge". It's only on the slow electro-dub of "Halfway to Yesterday" that Swayzak evidence how innovative this album could have been. Forgoing the expected indicators of digidub (reverbed rimshots, Pole-like distortion), Swayzak create a massive void through which their vocalist reminisces, as a cyborg harpsichord occasionally fills the void. They keep percussion to a bare minimum, making the listener feel as lost and abandoned as the vocalist-- it truly is 21st Century dub.
Yet, realizing that their key audience might be bewildered by such innovation, Swayzak return to plink-plonk electroclash with the ghastly "Take My Hand". In recompense, Clair Dietrich's vocals imbue the tech-house "Sob 1" with languid jazz-- similar to labelmate Herbert's Bodily Functions-- but Dietrich's French purr can't hold even a penny candle to the beguiling honesty of Herbert's Dani Sciliano. And then, Dirty Dancing closes with the immensely predictable "Ping Pong", sampling the primitive sounds of said video game as some plumy Brit repeats the title. Though the album sparsely showcases what excellence Taylor and Brown are capable of, it mostly finds them lollygagging on paths well rutted by nag-drawn bandwagons. Or, to put it more succinctly: their retro-futurism fails to make me chuckle in ironic solidarity.
