Winter Disco

The phrase above, from a Jon Dale review of the Junior Boys, encapsulates very nicely my current choice of music-for-January-dejection: The Best of Chic Volume 2, or 'the records after 'Good Times' that nobody bought'. Chic were already a glacial, almost forbidding group, with their melancholic and strangely Appollonian imprecations to dancing. This stuff does away with the lushness/bleakness tension of their two unimpeachable masterpieces, C'est Chic, Risque (and their Diana Ross LP) and mostly just leaves the bleakness. Sparse, spatial and catatonic funk, riven by memory ('Flash Back'), lots of lachrymose ballads that sound decidedly MOR until their off-centredness and perversity sinks in, and just occasionally, Teutonic-disco marches that are almost uplifting in a peculiarly static, blank way ('Believer'). The sound of misery in a Tuxedo.