SG Lewis - Times

Pitchfork 69

Read Dani Blum’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

(EMI, PMR)
Given the British producer’s skill for emotionally attuned nightclub elation, his debut shouldn’t suffer from the shutdown of its natural club habitat

Recently, the various social media feeds of singer-songwriter-producer SG Lewis have offered up everything from tutorials on recording techniques to live streams during which Lewis displays his ability to down cans of lager in one. In between, comes evidence of Lewis’s obsession with disco, for which he has evidently fallen hard.

There are glowing recommendations for Tim Lawrence’s magisterial book Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970-79. There are videos of the British producer flicking through disco 12-inches in a secondhand record shop and clips of him interviewing Alex Rosner, the genial, pipe-smoking designer of the sound systems at legendary 70s NY clubs the Loft and the Gallery, whose voice appears over tinkling synth arpeggios on Times’s brief instrumental Rosner’s Interlude. And there are screenshots of messages from Nile Rogers, who makes an appearance on his single One More. Indeed, the original title of Lewis’s album was the Chic-derived Good Times, before the adjective was lopped off, presumably when it became apparent that calling an album Good Times would seem unnecessarily sarcastic given the current state of the world.

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