Big Black Coat was the sound of Junior Boys injecting their trademark sound (blue-eyed electro-soul and bedroom-confessional IDM) with techno vigor. Six months after Canadian electronic duo released their most stylistic quantum leap of their career, the Kiss Me All Night EP returns to the quiet, introspective feel Junior Boys were known for, all without compromising on their recent musical advancements. This isn't a record to light up the dance floor; it’s a record you put on at the beginning of the night, with its more minimal, ear-expanding instrumentation acting as a preamble to the harder, faster beats to come.
That’s not to say that Kiss Me All Night completely drops Junior Boys’ newfound edge, it just dials back the rave. It draws more on European traditions of deconstructing dance music, rather the hot-blooded abandon other artists may see as the genre’s purpose. Teasing this border has always been an ace up Junior Boys’ sleeve, like on the EP’s opening track, “Yes.” The song coldly spirals around a recurring sample of a slurred vocal repeating “yeah” over and over, the pulsing synth swells becoming more and more hypnotic with each listen. Frontman Jeremy Greenspan’s whisper-croon weaves around the sample, always a blend between passionate lover and emotional car wreck. “Baby Fat” also makes good use of his vocals, as he softly sings of loves lost supported by a pop-rock guitar riff like something Lionel Richie would have pulled out in the mid-’80s.
The centerpiece here is “Some People Are Crazy,” the closest thing Junior Boys will ever come to a power ballad, which it turns out sounds a lot like a tropical house banger slowed down 200 percent and thrown into the deep end of the Milky Way. It’s a cover of a song by British soft-rock icon John Martyn, a subtle touchstone for Junior Boys’ bookishly futuristic funk. Warm tones bubble atop a skittish drum beat that easily drifts through the middle of the record. While the original is a masterclass in electric piano and ultra-slack bass lines, the band have done a stellar job at folding “Some People Are Crazy” into their own mythology, retaining just enough of its retro feel to keep the through line between the past and the present. Recently, Junior Boys have adopted Prince as a rather prominent influence, but while Big Black Coat dipped into the Purple One’s electro-tinged “Controversy”-era, the languorously sexy “Kiss Me All Night” recalls the emotional maturity and erotic playfulness of *Parade**, *with its metronomic disco beat and robotic keyboard stabs.
Since the songs on Kiss Me All Night are good enough to warrant an official release but don’t quite mesh with the boldness of Big Black Coat, the EP feels a little light—at worst, an addendum, at best, a victory lap. However, it is still another transformation for Junior Boys, more proof that by continuously and decidedly evolving their musical identity, they will continue spinning gold out of their detail-oriented, almost scientific approach to dance music.
