Disco Romance

Sally Shapiro's "Disco Romance" album is a lilting and introspective piece of work - which sounds like an odd way to describe a disco album, but it somehow manages to maintain a glacial calm and a hint of sadness in every single track, even when the BPM's are pretty fast and the drum machine is churning out robotic beats for all it's worth. Essentially a project by Swedish musician Johan Agebjorn, it's unlikely that the artist "Sally Shapiro" herself is the driving force behind it, especially as there have been no personal appearances or live performances by her to promote the album.

Perhaps it's because of this odd mix that the album stands up as a real curiosity. The style of the music harks back to the synthesized dance sound of Italo Disco: simple electronic dance music with rolling bass lines and hypnotically repetitive percussion. While this style of instrumentation is almost impossible to date, you probably wouldn't ever mistake it for a vintage 1980's production, because although it does share a lot of the same qualities, the singing style places it firmly in modern territory. I've listened to a lot of Italo Disco and if there's one thing they did with their vocals, its that they delivered them in earnest. Sally Shapiro's singing style on the other hand, is dreamy and directionless, sounding almost too measuredly insubstantial to be taken at face value. Although pleasant on the ear, to me it places the album firmly in the self-aware ballpark, and one thing about Italo Disco was that it was not knowingly designed to appeal to a cult audience, it just turned out that way.

The album has been most likened to the "Romantic Dance" music of Valerie Dore, and I can see why, as those records are rather slower than normal disco records and they also feature a rather frail sounding vocal with a hint of a European accent (Shapiro apparently hails from Sweden), but "Disco Romance" has a tougher, more savvy edge than Valerie Dore's uncomplicated hits, and reminds me more of St Etienne mixed with Air than anything from as far back as the 1980's. As I mentioned, some of the songs are pretty fast and if you hear the track "Overload", which is a B-side to one of the singles off this album, it clear that producer Agebjorn is also a huge admirer of the Dutch instrumental synth-group Laserdance. Interestingly, Laserdance producer Michel van der Kuy also released more commercial tracks that featured unidentified female vocalists singing under various pseudonyms, so the tradition seems to be alive and well with the artist known as Sally Shapiro!

The lyrics of the songs on Disco Romance also spring from a more modern sensibility, as they often entwine childishly simple emotions with genuine introspective angst. Maybe I'm over analyzing, maybe it's meant to be taken at face value. But all this complexity of interpretation for songs that couldn't sound more simple on the surface leads me to conclude that "Disco Romance" is an album worthy of attention. Otherwise I wouldn't still be trying to work out exactly what it's all about! Fans of the afore mentioned bands (St Etienne and Air) might find much to enjoy here, as would fans of Italo disco. Bear in mind though that it's quite a one-dimensional album, with only a small selection of songs, all of which have a very similar sound (one song even appears twice in two mixes, which definitely smacks of padding), so I doubt if there will be much more to be heard from this particular source. A nice diversion, all the same.