When it comes to making pleasure-centric middlebrow pop-dance albums, you can't fault Simian Mobile Disco's instincts. Vocalists are good. Filler is bad. Hooks are a must. Nods to underground sounds must not alienate the unfamiliar. And an approach to genre that ranges somewhere from "catholic" to "aggressively eclectic" is the only way to hold the attention of the uncommitted.
Sure, judged by those increasingly out-of-date album-qua-album standards, Temporary Pleasure is something of a mess. It doesn't "flow." Sonically, SMD sticks to the neon thread that runs from the glittering prizes of 1980s synth-pop through Latin freestyle roller-skating jams and on into the earliest house and techno whose smiley-faced exterior wooed radio programmers. TP feels like 10 distinct singles, each pastiching a slightly different side of well-trod retro-modern electronic/club culture, connected by an album title and little else. And the disparity in quality between those singles can be pretty stark.
The album also lacks the immediate replay value of the best pop craftsmanship, the kind of choruses, breakdowns, or random spine-tingling musical asides that make you rewind a track before it's finished to relive the shiver all over again. Sure, even the most uninspired femme diva material (cf. Beth Ditto doing her best bedroom-mirror Crystal Waters on the somnambulant "Cruel Intentions") on Temporary Pleasure never irritates like "Poker Face". Young Fathers' skills on "Turn Up the Dial" surely best anything Flo Rida's farted out in the last 24 months. But you also can't picture a single SMD song besting Billboard's current kings when it comes to the kind of dance-pop that works as well on drive-time Top 40 as it does during a club's peak hours. Less irritating than Lady Gaga or "Low" is one thing, but SMD would still pale next to fellow 80s fetishist The-Dream's lesser efforts.
At their worst, SMD's turns toward "songwriting" are crass and half-assed at once, slapdash stuff that points out the mix of sweat and inspiration that goes into even the most effortless-seeming bubblegum. A truly terrible song, "Audacity of Huge" dares you to make it through Yeasayer's Chris Keating pulling on an ill-fitting sassy diva costume and snapping his way through an increasingly ridiculous big-spender shtick. (Swimming pool filled with grape Kool-Aid, mother-of-pearl oyster fork, bio-diesel dirigible, et friggin' cetera.) The song is a reminder of why so much electroclash stiffed on impact: A guest vocalist and sarcastic high-life signifiers do not a sure-shot jukebox hit make.
Not so shockingly, Temporary Pleasures delivers more reliably on its title when it sticks to straight-up dance. "Synthesise" is a fierce little slice of hyper-compressed gospel-techno, somewhere between an abstract Blaze belter and Justice at their less intentionally abrasive. "Ambulance" is a slow-burning accumulation of acid squiggles and Emergency Broadcast System sirens that stays just on the pleasing side of shrill.
But throw on SMD's best (old) single, "It's the Beat". Listen to how the track builds and maintains interest with good old inhuman techno building blocks-- nagging bleep, a few overlapping synth squiggles. The sampled snatches of rap are useful punctuation, but the track wouldn't collapse without them. It becomes clear that for a distressingly large chunk of Temporary Pleasures, the duo has forgotten to do much of interest with the backing tracks in favor of roping in a rolodex's worth of singers and rappers and hoping the songs write themselves. Yeah, Technotronic had Ya Kid K. But what everyone really remembers is those riffs.
