Work

Holy Ghost! have been making music for nearly twice as long as the golden era of disco, boogie, and 1980s AOR that their sound invokes. Their longevity is a testament both to Alex Frankel and Nicholas Millhiser’s dogged ambition and the everlasting fertility of the style they’ve adopted. Their third album, Work, opens in a familiar mood: a tasteful cocaine-Koyaanisqatsi bed of sequencers, a sturdy piano riff, and a guitar gurgling like champagne bubbles, all gently rising in a 30-second intro just long enough to let you powder your nose and hit the floor.

But on Work, it sounds like the champagne’s corked. “There’s nowhere really left to go,” Alex Frankel sings on “Epton on Broadway Part I.” The track chugs along. “There’s nothing really left to say/…but if you want, if you want we’ll stay.” Later, the brief “Epton on Broadway Part II” vamps in a filter-disco style for two minutes, then runs out of gas.

Throughout the album, the New York City duo adopts a defensive slouch. The record is expertly mixed and produced: It brims with fully realized moments, like a synth bit on “Anxious” that conjures the exact feeling of seeing an ex like someone else’s post on Instagram; the portamentos on “Slow Burn” should come with a vertigo warning. But the album’s mood is just sour. “You can say we’re stupid, stupid, stupid/But we’re not about to let go,” goes the chorus of “Do This,” which then offers a bit of Imagine Dragons-y festival chanting as if to demonstrate why someone would say such a thing. “Heaven Knows What” is basically “I Keep Forgettin'” plus Frippertronics and icky lyrics like, “I think that I’m moving on/Say I’m kept, look at the company you keep.” The amiably elegant swing of “Nicky Buckingham” offers strings and crisp drums, a la Metro Area, but the macho posturing (“Trash talk/The neighborhood got too busy, didn’t it/Too soft”) is a poor fit.

Authenticity is a bore, and clearly not something Holy Ghost! give a fuck about. This is the band, after all, that pulled off a scene-for-scene remake of New Order’s “Confusion” video. But also a bore is unpersuasive rabble-rousing like “Heaven Forbid,” in which Frankel intones “Get up/You can follow my lead/Sit down/You can take a seat” while the hook from Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” floats by. In “Soon,” a flaccid take on the guitar hook from “I Was Made for Lovin' You” joins an unswaggering iteration of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and Frankel sounds really in his feelings about it:

Can’t believe what I saidGood as newGood as deadSilent auction in the back of the roomDon’t happen too often and it just couldn’t happen too soonWe’re making this harder than it used to beIt’s trueDon’t get us started, don’t start with me

Two icons of 20th-century American culture adorn Work’s cover. The first is a piece by the crucial conceptual artist Agnes Denes, documenting what she reaped in convincing the Public Arts Fund to let her grow two acres of wheat in the landfill that once lay between the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. The second is the logo of West End Records, Mel Cheren’s disco label that, while Denes was plowing and sowing, was hard at work releasing holy queer scripture like Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face?” and other tracks that expanded the possibilities of dance music, like the filter-dub fantasia of Betty LaVette’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can.”

It takes nerve and good taste to conscript those auras. It takes some kind of chutzpah to leave the closest thing the 2000s had to a West End, DFA, in order to convince West End itself to relaunch. And it is a goddamn public service to convince the very inventor of the remix, Tom Moulton, to work his magic on one of your tracks, “Anxious,” then put it out on a 12" benefiting GMHC and LIFEbeat in honor of Cheren, who died of AIDS in 2007. Especially when the remix—as breezy as a Sound Signature boot, as witty and wise as Róisín Murphy’s epics—embodies the sound Holy Ghost! insist they will not stop chasing, and when closer “Escape from Los Angeles” proves the duo can still can catch it. But too often on Work, Holy Ghost! mostly sound like they resent not being allowed to go out and play. What’s stopping them?

Buy: Rough Trade