Monday 24 May 2010

Silver Columns - Yes, And Dance

Pop music is about fantasy. Fantasy is about sex. Sex is about imagination. So in the minds eye the hip wiggling, Bronski Beat referencing, glitterball Hi-NRG disco stormer Brow Beaten by Silver Columns provides the hedonistic dream of rubber clad boys cruising for action on the dance floor.

Silver Columns provide this non-reality and many other illusions on their debut album Yes, And Dance – a collection of electro-groove pop songs not far removed from Hot Chip – another band who like Silver Columns released their debut album through Moshi Moshi records. Laced with dance floor pulses and sequenced bass lines to get things moving, Silver Columns add quirky studio trickery and effects over the top to make Yes, And Dance as much fun sitting on the sofa as out in the club. There’s enough variation from heady disco numbers to more plaintive tunes to provide a full listening experience.

So you get a rubbery Blue Monday era New Order on Always On, the lonely spaced-out choirboy groove of Columns, the sound of robots copulating with arcade machines for a minute and a half on It Is Still You and the sharp travelling rhythms and beats of Cavalier - a song that conjures images of speeding train journeys. Each track is a little disco fantasy created by androids with a heart.

Of course this is all just reverie. The reality is that Silver Columns are Adem Ilhan from Fridge and folk chap Johnny “Pictish Trail” Lynch – two regular(ish) musicians who have built Yes, And Dance out of studio bound computerisation. They are not alas, as far as is known, a musical version of C-3PO or in the case of Brow Beaten a greased up gang of cock thrusting electro-queers. However sometimes the reality is better than the fantasy – and whatever visions Yes, And Dance creates, it’s a solid, sometimes eccentric piece of dancefloor fun.

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