Disclosure // Settle
Man, these boys make me want to buy a Citroen Saxo and drive it endlessly round the inner sanctum of the City Walls.
Listening to the Radio 1 Big Weekend coverage this weekend, I caught the apex of Disclosure’s set and all at once, the duo made themselves known to me. Sure I’d already heard ‘White Noise’ and ‘Latch’ on regular rotation across all airwaves, but that’s sometimes not enough. You can’t just exist; you have to be relevant in some arena. Friendly Fires did it in 2008 when they tore up festival stages, and extended their debut album tracks into carnivalesque sambathons and this weekend, people went from listening, to standing up and paying attention. They have the tracks to back it up; aside from the already released singles, they introduce the album with homage to Chicago House, with ‘When a Fire Starts to Burn’. And I name-checked them earlier without realising that Friendly Fires’ Ed Macfarlane takes vocal duties on the guiltily reminiscent garage swell of ‘Defeated No More’. Ed isn’t the only guest vocalist, and the Disclosure boys use different songsters to great effect, adding to their colour palette with Jessie Ware, Eliza Dolittle, Jamie Woon and more. They have relevance now – to the context of UK garage history, to 2013, to this summer. Man, these boys make me want to buy a Citroen Saxo and drive it endlessly round the inner sanctum of the City Walls. And believe it or not, that’s a good thing.
8/10 Emma R. Garwood
