Disclosure: Energy review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week
(Island Records)
With nightclubs closed during coronavirus, the third album from the British pop-house duo has an unwittingly mournful quality
Occasionally, songs take on qualities that their authors never intended them to have. The passage of time casts different light on them; political groups and protest movements co-opt them, lending unanticipated meaning to the words; artists unexpectedly die and their final work becomes freighted with poignancy. To a roll-call that includes Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street, John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over, Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm and McFadden & Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, we now might add, a little unexpectedly, the third album by Surrey-born pop-house duo Disclosure, which events overtook before it was even released.
There may have been less opportune moments in history to put out an album filled with songs hymning the pleasures of clubs, of dancing en masse and of fleeting eyes-meeting-across-the-dancefloor romance, but you struggle to think of one. Energy arrives in a world where most venues are shuttered and festivals cancelled, where dancing with others carries with it the potential of contracting a fatal illness, where illegal raves have become a bigger public bugbear than in the Criminal Justice Act-provoking wake of Castlemorton, and where the dance scene has recently been convulsed by an argument about whether DJs should DJ at all. Online footage of big name DJs playing in continental Europe this month was greeted with general horror, the legal but maskless, non-socially-distanced “plague raves” they were performing at held by some to have contributed to a rise in Covid-19 infections.