A salute to Salute and their pop house True Magic
You know what kind of music no one makes any more? Pop house. By which I mean, obviously hundreds of thousands of producers make pop house but no one likes to admit it.
I can understand this, in a way. House, on its own, can be very poppy, like the disco and funk music it evolved from. Saying something is pop house is almost too much, like speaking of a nutritious egg or a cleansing shower. Right from the start - think Move Your Body or Love Can’t Turn Around - house has had pop running clean through its veins.
Even at it more experimental - Todd Edwards’ remix of St Germain’s Alabama Blues, say - house can be absolutely resplendent in hooks, however unusual they may be. When you talk about pop house, meanwhile, people tend to think of Phats and Small, latter Bob Sinclar or David Guetta, house music at its lowest, cheapest ebb.
It was refreshing, then, to hear the young Vienna-via-Manchester artist Salute talk about pop house when I interviewed them last week for Line Noise. “I didn't really go into the writing of the album with much of a plan. All I knew is that I didn't want to develop a concept before I made the album. I just wanted to write a project with songs on. I wanted to approach it like Quincy Jones would approach a record he was producing for a big pop artist,” they said. The goal, Salute added, “was to make a really strong dance pop album” like Disclosure’s Settle “that would hopefully introduce people who are not really into dance music or house specifically to it”.
Salute was talking about their debut album, True Magic, which comes out this Friday. The record is Pop House!!! with capital “P”, capital “H” and a load of ear-pricking exclamation marks. There is little new, experimental or strange about this record. Sure, True Magic, Bonus Round, does speak to the Austrian drum & bass dons like Camo & Krooked that Salute loved as a teenager. But beyond that, the album pops with house beats, UK Garage undertones of the brightest renown and guest vocals, like Settle remapped for 2024 or Basement Jaxx’s Remedy beamed into a more accepting future.
Even the guests - Rina Sawayama, Disclosure themselves, Empress Of, Karma Kid, Sam Gellaitry, piri, Léa Sen, LEILAH and Nakamura Minami - are pretty conventional. Impressive, perhaps, but nothing that really pushes the boat out, à la Basement Jaxx getting Siouxsie Sioux, Dizzee Rascal and JC Chasez in on their third album, Kish Kash. (An album I don’t really like but which certainly had ambition.)
And it turns out that is just fine. True Magic has no arch concept behind it, no wild, envelope-pushing experiments and no attempts to re-invent the dance wheel. It could pretty much have been made in 2014, 2004 or even - at a push - 1994 and it stands and falls instead on its songwriting and production. It True Magic makes you dance, sing and have fun, that’s more than enough. It’s like the anti-conceptronica, dance music that stands or falls entirely on its own musical merits.
And that it does in abundance. In keeping with the album’s Pop House roots, 14 songs whizz by in 44 minutes, a cavalcade of vocal hooks, catchy bass lines and artfully swinging drum machines. Salute told me that both Todd Edwards and Disclosure are big influences and you can hear this throughout the album, with its clipped, rhythmic production and booming bass lines, which meet the filter effects and disco-ish guitar chucks of classic French House. At its best, True Magic is a mixture of French House’s polished touch and Garage’s slightly harsh feel, like Modjo's Lady with a five o’ clock shadow
As a fan of both genres of music, this suits me perfectly. But without strong songwriting and artful hooks True Magic would soon wear out its charm. The ultra-tough, deviously insistent Saving Flowers, with Rina Sawayama, is an exercise in how to make a dance-floor love song without crossing into mawkishness; Reason, with Karma Kid, is punk house, with a riotous bass line that would make The Buffalo Bunch sit up and stare; Lift Off!, with Disclosure, has a cut-up vocal of the highest tangled quality; Maybe It’s U, with Sam Gellaitry, is Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me with new house energy and a winning key change; One of Those Nights, with Empress Of, is like a classic RZA production sped up to +16; and so on.
True Magic is one paced, relentlessly upbeat and easily digestible. And these, in the context, are good things. The album is home to the kind of music that might get called shallow by dullards who think that sad will always equate to deep, by people who don't realise how hard it can be to write a happy song, let alone one that effortlessly combines pop with underground (ish) house.
“I love dance music,” Salute told me. “Dance music is my big love. But so is pop. And I grew up on a really healthy diet of 70s, 80s and 90s pop music. And I love R&B. I love songwriting. Some of the best dance music ever created is instrumental. But equally some of the best dance music ever created is very poppy.
“If you think about One More Time by Daft Punk that is essentially a pop tune. And it's an amazing song. Pop doesn't have to be negative or a dirty word. If the music is good, the music's good.”
Amen to that. True Magic can be slightly exhausting to take in one sitting. But it isn’t really designed for sitting. It’s Pop House at its fashionably unfashionable best. And in the age of the club pop edit it seems far more daring to try to create your own pop songs, rather than pitching up someone else’s and putting a large beat underneath them.
Some listening
Scanner and Neil Leonard - Time Code
It is 34 years since Robin Rimbaud released the first Scanner album (and 30 years since I first saw him live, at the Phoenix festival) and the continued excellence of his music is astounding. Time Code is taken from his most recent release, The Berklee Sessions, with composer Neil Leonard. The album sees Rimbaud and band (Leonard on soprano and alto saxophones, bass clarinet and live electronics; David Tronzo on electric guitar; Mike Rivard on bass and Dean Johnston on drums) improvise their way around various Scanner compositions during an intensive one-day session in 2014, which Rimbaud then spent months editing, mixing and producing. It’s kind of psychedelic rock, kind of jazz and kind of experimental electronics. And if that makes you think of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew then you would be correct, with a sly dose of humour and every-day emotion on top.
Chrystabell and David Lynch - Sublime Eternal Love
I’m sure someone has done it before, but the overlapping vocal effect on Sublime Eternal Love, the new single from Texan singer Chrystabell and David Lynch, in which several different vocal lines tangle around each other like drunken birds in slow flight, left me open mouthed. And the fact that the song’s production appears to nod to Angelo Badalamenti’s legendarily unsettling Laura Palmer's Theme, from Twin Peaks, is a beautiful touch.
Anton Friisgaard and Pande Made Gangga Sentana - Syrati
After witnessing a concert by Gamelan ensemble Gamelan Salukat at the Roskilde Festival in 2018, Danish electronic music producer Anton Friisgaard became fascinated with the gamelan sound, eventually traveling to Ubud, Bali, to record with various local musicians. The result is Teratai Åkande, Friisgaard’s forthcoming album, in which electronic techniques are applied to sounds, melodies and rhythms from Balinese gamelan. The worry with these kind of records is that the Western producer will come in and stomp their useless authority all over the sounds they intended to capture; but Syrati suggests this isn’t the case, with Friisgard’s electronic touches very much in a supporting role to the captivating microtonal sounds of Balinese gamelan, creating a subtle but enchanting fusion.
Melenas - 1000 Canciones (Tim Gane (Stereolab) mix)
Like the intelligent, well-informed people they undoubtedly are, Pamplona garage punks Melenas are big Stereolab fans. After sharing a bill with the band in 2021, they got to know guitarist Tim Gane and eventually asked him to remix their 1000 Canciones, the results being an infinitely elegant drift of wafting drum machines, cloud-burst synths and whispered vocals, like a particularly spaced out Navarran Stereolab.
Jasy Del Rey feat. Naranja Cuatro - Conuco (DJ Phidias Remix)
Dub house is a wonderful - and much under-used - sound. And it turns out that if you add cumbia into that equation things get even better. Add to THAT Venezuelan queer icon Jasy Del Rey and Naranja Cuatro on vocals, in an ode to Del Rey “discovering her sexuality through the magic realism of her hometown’s conucos [kind of like Venezuelan allotments, I believe]”, plus Barcelona’s own DJ Phidias on remix and you have an irresistible package for the summer.… AND I have one Bandcamp download link to give away to the first person to get in touch, by commenting below. What more do you want?
If you’re quick, you should still be able to download the new SAULT track? / album? from WeTransfer. And I really do suggest you do: Acts of Faith is a 32-minute suite of soulful jazz funk, à la Rotary Connection, that is quite supernaturally beautiful.
Things I’ve done
As mentioned above, I interviewed Salute this week, for Line Noise. The sound quality is not exactly clear as a mountain stream but I really enjoyed talking to an exciting new producer, who shares a lot of my loves - jungle, Todd Edwards etc. And Salute lives in Manchester, like all the best people.
The playlists
My newest and the bestest playlist on Spotify has all the best new music from the last three years. It is on 92 likes and I would dearly love to get it to 100. My newest and the bestest 2024 playlist has the same, but from this year. It is on a miserly 82 likes and I would love to see its centenary.