Simian Mobile Disco

Temporary Pleasure (Wichita)

By Dana Raidt
Published: August 25th, 2009 | 12:08am

It’s a bad sign when the best song on an album chock full of guest vocalists is instrumental. It also doesn’t bode too well when a dance record doesn’t really make you want to dance. James Ford and Jas Shaw were able to attract bigger guest stars for Temporary Pleasure, but it seems the duo put all their energy into getting the big names and not enough time into the album itself. Unfortunately for the English DJ-producers: even though we may live in a world where everyone’s a DJ and hipsters have co-opted dancing, it doesn’t mean that super cool guest vocalists plus mediocre beats necessarily equal a great dance record.

The dance-worthy tracks on Temporary Pleasure are few and far between. “Turn Up the Dial” featuring Scottish hip-hop trio Young Fathers comes closest to matching the energy of SMD’s excellent 2007 debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release (Wichita). The aforementioned instrumental, “10,000 Horses Can’t Be Wrong,” is minimalist and glitchy with a hint of darkness. “Pinball,” featuring Telepathe, is immediately likeable — until you realize that’s because it is basically a Telepathe song. The beats in the Jamie Lidell-sung “Off the Map” hearken back to one of the group’s better singles, “Hustler,” but it (and the rest of the album) never reaches that satisfying breakdown — the “wait for it, wait for it…” that made Simian Mobile Disco songs of the past so great. Not even Beth Ditto can save “Cruel Intentions,” a slow, boring ballad that is more suited to Sally Shapiro or Lykke Li than to an icon of Ditto’s vocal caliber.

Temporary Pleasure, while listenable, is mostly just ridiculous (“Audacity Of Huge” finds the very talented Chris Keating of Yeasayer singing about Roomba vacuums, Bill Murray, and MiniDiscs). And while there’s a place for ridiculousness in all genres of music, the impression given on this record is that Ford and Shaw aren’t meaning to be ridiculous. It seems they actually took this project very seriously, or at least were very busy calling friends to sing. The duo has definitely upped the cool points by adding bigger stars, but perhaps they should have left well enough alone.

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