The Brighter The Light
It’s always after midnight in The Juan MacLean’s world. Cobbling together bits of house, disco, and the punkier end of club culture, their music offers an idealized view of nightlife, writ large—decades’ worth of dance floors rolled up into a single potent package. The beats are even more powerful on *The Brighter the Light*, which gathers six years of the duo’s singles, yielding an hour of the kind of smoldering grooves that typically greet the dawn in warehouses from Brooklyn to Berlin. The ’80s influence so integral to their music remains pronounced on “What Do You Feel Free About?” and “Zone Non Linear,” which invoke the glory days of Jellybean Benitez B-sides. They also flirt with dub techno on “Quiet Magician,” while “Can You Ever Really Know Somebody” (featuring one of frontwoman Nancy Whang’s standout performances on the record) summons the iridescent textures of Luomo’s *Vocalcity*, which helped kick off the deep-house revival of 2000. The title track, an instrumental, closes the LP with some of the deepest grooves in TJM’s catalog—moody piano house touched up with a silvery hint of acid, suggesting the first rays of sunlight peeking through basement windows.
The Juan Maclean return to DFA with a compilation LP of 12-inch singles they’ve amassed over the past six years – re-edited, re-mastered, and ready for fans who may have missed the tracks the first time around. From the dub house sway of 2013’s “You Are My Destiny” to the high-energy stomp of this May’s “Zone Non Linear,” and featuring two never-before-released tracks, “Quiet Magician” and “Pressure Danger,” The Juan Maclean once again justify their longevity as a musical force that is more than capable of repurposing club tracks for every setting. The Brighter The Light is put together in a way that lends itself to appreciating the sheer banging quality of the songs while simultaneously being able to dance to them in your living room. For example, take “Feel Like Movin,’” which Pitchfork called “gloriously beatific” and “pure DFA gold.” In the new remastered version, the fullness of the keys and the kicks takes over, unfurling across the listener. Deep house rhythms, sparkling synths and a certain spaciousness are what’s emphasized across the record. Gone is the slow-motion melancholy disco from their recent full-lengths – The Brighter The Light is all fierce enthusiasm and dance floor missives, perfect for those who aren’t quite ready to let go of summer. Juan Maclean is a DJ and producer who has been a mainstay of the New York club scene, as well as maintaining a rigorous international touring schedule, since the release of his first records on DFA in 2002. Vocalist Nancy Whang is his longtime collaborator, best known as a founding member of LCD Soundsystem and a busy touring DJ. Together, the two artists have released an extensive catalogue of 12” singles and full-length albums for DFA, including 2014’s seminal In A Dream LP. The proper follow-up studio album will follow in 2020.
A collection of the duo’s 12" singles from the past six years proves their dancefloor nous but lacks the playfully eclectic spirit of previous albums.
In 2013, the Juan MacLean resumed releasing singles after a short hiatus, starting with "You Are My Destiny."
Five years ago, electronic duo the Juan MacLean released In a Dream, a richly complex gem of an album that took their music out of essentializing...