Simian Mobile Disco - Welcome To Sideways

Pitchfork 68

For many groups, it can be just as difficult to grow out of a specific time or place as it is to shed the preconceptions attached to one hit track. Simian Mobile Disco, the production duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw, reached crossover success in the mid-’00s, as part of a brief yet strangely prolific microgenre that has been described as everything from “new rave” to the cringeworthy moniker “bloghouse.” Disappearing pretty much as soon as it was conceived, and despite giving birth to some fairly decent music, bloghouse, like so many frivolous electro genres before it, fell almost immediately out of favor with the tastemakers and cool kids who tend to be the arbiters of such things (consider that the Justice remix of Ford and Shaw’s previous band Simian’s most successful song somehow became the title of Zac Efron’s ridiculously uncool DJ drama We Are Your Friends). As a new decade began and EDM started to slowly encroach on mainstream electronic music, other acts that came up at the same time as SMD, like Justice, Kavinsky, Boys Noize, and Digitalism, began to lose their footing, their more pop-influenced aesthetic pushed out by a harsher, sweatier style of techno.

The success of SMD lies in their singular approach to this problem. Instead of trying to hold onto the style of their defining debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, and its relatively vocal-heavy, DJ-friendly string of dancefloor bangers, each of their subsequent releases has showcased a different side of their considerable analogue production talents. Their discography runs the gamut of what techno has to offer: Their sophomore release, Temporary Pleasure, harked back to the radio-friendliness of late-’90s big beat, whereas 2014’s Whorl was entirely recorded at an intimate show in Joshua Tree, CA and reworked as an experimental, improvisational piece. As it turns out, SMD’s initial wave of popularity was more of a happy fluke than a measuring stick for the rest of their career.

Welcome to Sideways lies on the clubbier side of SMD’s output, but as more of an instrumental exercise in sustenance and restraint than the needle-drops and fist-pumps that have become synonymous with tech house. The album opens with the simple 4/4 beat of “Happening Distractions,” the building block on which Welcome to Sideways constructs its minimal melodies and heady, spacious sequencing. Good electronic music is almost always a method of addition rather than subtraction, and all of the tracks on the album begin as skeletal imprints of sounds and ideas before they take full form. Other early tracks like “Far Away From a Distance” and “Bubble Has No Answers” mimic the build-ups of SMD’s harder past releases but in a drawn-out and dream-like state—when the beat does drop halfway through these mini-odysseys, it’s muted and disconnected, like hearing a raging party from beneath a tranquil Ibiza swimming pool.

However, this is far from a party record. Clocking in at just over an hour in length, Welcome to Sideways is a study in dance music rather than a practice, one of those albums where skipping to a desired track is useless, as its meant to be experienced as a whole suite. “Remember in Reverse” begins with a soothing loop that’s gradually overcome by stacked glitches and fades until it reaches soaring altitude, and the seven-and-a-half minute closer “Drone Follows Me Everywhere” is SMD at their most oppressive, one pounding beat layered with a lead blanket of dark synths. For an act that has seen it’s biggest dividends producing easily consumable techno-pop, this variation might seem like a risk, and if Ford and Shaw hadn't already built a sturdy reputation as analogue technicians, it would be. But SMD have been doing this for a long time, and know how to toe the thin line between hypnosis and boredom. This album may not be their most compelling release to date, but it remains the work of two uniquely complementary musicians set on an ever-evolving path.