The opening track of Los Angeles-based duo De Lux’s third album is a story about hustling to pay the rent. One of its hooks is a hustle, that almost turns into Van McCoy’s; the guitar lick from Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” also turns up. Anyway, “875 Dollars” is a song about the difficulty of taking on and protecting a legacy from a band who clearly know their history well enough to be nervous about their place in it.
More Disco Songs About Love nods, of course, to Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, and singer Sean Guerin often sounds unnervingly similar to David Byrne. It’s tempting to meet one reference with another. This might be 21st-century indie pop music, but it ain’t no disco. De Lux is disco the way bands like Wild Nothing, Cut Copy, Holy Ghost!, Bear in Heaven, and Phoenix might be disco: that is, sort of. De Lux’s last record, 2015’s Generation, was full of hospitable songs built on the four-four thump, with frames of simple basslines draped with flowing synthesizer. It was inspired by Karen Finley’s shocking and disgracefully unheralded 1987 album The Truth Is Hard to Swallow, though there’s none of Finley’s politicized rhymes, raucous noise, or glorious filth. De Lux’s disco is tasteful; it sounds like good cheekbones and better record collections. It’s the disco of Roxy Music, not Patrice Rushen, but with Bryan Ferry’s debonair weariness swapped out for the wounded machismo of, like, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”
The second track is called “These Are Some of the Things That I Think About,” and one of those things is: “What if I had the chance to rewrite what it means to dance?” Sal P of the legendary Liquid Liquid saw that chance 35 years ago, and merged punk and percussion into tracks like “Cavern,” which did enact this revision. But De Lux are stuck thinking about it, and ultimately the chance slips away. Sal himself appears on the lovely third track, “Smarter Harder Darker,” which reads like a misheard Daft Punk title but glistens in a genial, jazzy kind of way. They bring another post-punk legend, the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, onto “Stratosphere Girl,” and he howls about voodoo.
Are these songs about love? There’s not much romance. “Keyboards Cause We’re Black and White” might be broadly about race, but its uncertain tone leads to confusion about whether they’re just goofing on “Ebony and Ivory.” Other tracks attempt to tackle toxic masculinity: the titular narrator of “Music Snob” is aware of his own boorishness, but that’s not enough to redeem him. “I guess I’m a music snob,” he says, “Even if I say I’m not/My girlfriend doesn’t like me/’Cause I hate to do laundry.” Fair enough, men are pigs, but the bro culture verses become bromides in the chorus about the need for connection, and ideas around why men behave this way are left unoffered. (Karen Finley has some good theories.) A strange moment where Guerin’s mother pops in to speak in French about crepes hints at other, more interesting avenues, but the song soon returns to its sighing refrain of “I’ll show you my taste is like,” which, in 2018, sort of sounds like a threat.
Things get meta with “Writing Music for Money, to Write More Music,” in which Guerin wonders: “Maybe I should get a job/And work for an agency/Because in case I write another song/And it doesn’t mean anything.” Today, the concept of selling out seems as outdated as eight-track players. Everybody’s got to pay the rent. But De Lux contemplates authenticity over an almost direct lift of Electronic’s “Getting Away with It,” a perfect pop song by three of music greatest writers. De Lux don’t stand a chance in comparison. But since they brought it up, they could definitely write some catchy jingles.
