The Juan Maclean - In A Dream Album Review
No matter how good LCD Soundsystem were - and they were good, weren't they? - there was still always a hipster whiff around James Murphy and his various projects, leaving you with the sensation that some of the time that the joke was on you.
Some of this has inevitably rubbed off down the years on the acts that roster the DFA label which he co-founded - not that he's ever seemed particularly bothered by most people's conceptions - but for The Juan Maclean it's less of a distraction. The tag is the nom-de-plume of long term Murphy associate John MacLean, for whom he was a sound engineer in the latter's noise outfit Six Finger Satellite. When they folded, MacLean quit music, got educated and then returned with his Latin-sounding moniker in 2005, edging back into it via his début album 'Less Than Human'.
If that, in places, was a record in thrall to Kraftwerk, underground house and bonkers old school plinky-plonk outfit Drexciya, 'In A Dream' draws heavily instead on 90s dance rock, smart post modern disco and first wave British synth-pop. Phew. At the forefront for most of the time is collaborator Nancy Whang, who lends a vaguely androgynous set of vocals over the almost dream wave of 'Here I Am' and the entertainingly louche soul of 'Running Back To You'.
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