Marcus Lambkin, the Irish producer who records as Shit Robot, is part of a lineage that runs through James Murphy's DFA empire. The pair met when Murphy was setting up a studio in a New York building where Lambkin had an office, and the latter has released music as Shit Robot sporadically in the years since. The title of his first full-length, 2010's From the Cradle to the Rave, hinted at his status as a lifer at this game, but few of his musical fascinations venture outside a small set of dance music influences. Lambkin's not necessarily interested in being current but he is interested in getting back to that moment of complete white-out on the dancefloor, where the future and past cease to matter and all that's left is to get lost in the present.
We Got a Love reads like an exercise in DFA box-ticking on the surface, and digging deeper doesn't reveal much depth beyond that. Tropes from house, rave, and disco are all present, along with a familiar switch-up between wailing and monotone vocals from an array of guests. But depth is probably something Lambkin never intended to be there in the first place. As a club record to zone out to, this doesn't reach the euphoria of Todd Terje at his best, or even the Juan MacLean's excellent "Feel Like Movin'", which was released last year on the flipside of Shit Robot's Reggie Watts-featuring single "We Got a Love". But it works for what it is—a solid set of impeccably produced club jams, all rinsed through an atmosphere that's never less than jubilant.
Watts has a couple of features here, bookending an album that includes appearances from LCD Soundsystem's Nancy Whang and Luke Jenner from the Rapture. Despite the array of approaches—Watts can go deadpan or diva, Whang is ultra flat, Jenner goes the full Barry Gibb—there's a firm hand guiding it all, bringing in piano stabs at just the right moment along with carefully programmed mechanical loops and clattering percussion and handclaps. The vintage house feel and "jack your body" refrain of "Do It (Right)" is as nostalgic and backward-looking as Kings of Leon or Mumford & Sons, but it's filtered through a set of influences that will remain forever impeccable. This is a world where Darryl Pandy and Anita Ward simply never grow old, remaining forever locked down in their finest moments.
Music that borrows heavily from dance music's past and post-punk is common, but Shit Robot sees little worth plundering beyond 1991 or 1992. The cut-off point here, and arguably across the DFA spectrum, appears to be the introduction of jungle and drum'n'bass, at which point a stern barrier to entry comes clattering down. An artist needn't enter that space, of course, but We Got a Love feels like a place we've visited countless times before, which raises questions about going back yet again. Even though the record is irresistible at times, it's also a feedback loop of nostalgia that's creaking as it turns.
