Reissue CDs Weekly: Too Slow to Disco

Various Artists: Too Slow to Disco

Too Slow to Disco is about the five years from 1975 onwards when men and woman alike sported billowing white shirts, had wind-swept, pouffed-up hair and sang frozen-nosed, freeze-dried songs in sensitive voices about love, love and more love. Fleetwood Mac defined the mellow, cotton-wool-shrouded sound of a California-dominated wave of singers and songwriters who weren’t going to break a sweat about anything despite being strung out on coke. The by-word was mellow.

This fascinating compilation makes the case that the cocaine cowboys and lush ladies riding that wave weren’t so bad after all, but isn’t quite as perception-altering as the recent collection of new age music I am the Center. We've already seen bands like Hall & Oates reclassified as cool and even The Eagles are not as hated as they once so often were. Ariel Pink, Fleet Foxes, Midlake and Jonathan Wilson all draw from what the punk-minded wanted to eradicate back then. Rather than being a bolt from the blue, this comp builds on an increasingly widespread fascination with the American brand of soft rock posthumously dubbed Yacht Rock after a satirical TV series which screened around 10 years ago.

It is a collection of often brilliant performances, some by artists better known for hits few probably want to hear again. Rupert Holmes (pictured left) will forever be measured by his still-annoying chart-topper “Escape (the Pina Colada Song)”. Yet here he his with the wonderful Philly-disco-inclined “Deco Lady” – the song’s subject spends money like rice and her clothes aren’t faggy, draggy. Chicago’s cloying “If You Leave me Now” will forever besmirch them, but their “Saturday in the Park” is fantastic. While tough to say anything new about Fleetwood Mac, hearing “Sugar Daddy” shorn from the context of their eponymous 1975 album is a reminder that they were once much more than their internal soap opera. Nicolette Larson’s (pictured below right) sole big hit, her version of Neil Young’s “Lotta Love”, is gorgeous.

But it’s the lesser-knowns or sometimes dismissed who really shine. The angel-voiced Alessi Brothers may have had such lovely hair that it proved a barrier to enjoying their music, but “Do You Feel it?” is the soundtrack to drifting on a cloud and the highlight. Eagles associate Ned Doheny's “Get it up For Love” is a synth-punctuated swoon despite the gross title. Browning Bryant’s groovy “Liverpool Fool” gives a lie to the collection’s title: he was backed by New Orleans funk legends The Meters.

All but one of the 19 tracks are from 1975 to 1980. Tony Joe White’s “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby”, from 1972, is an outlier, not just date-wise but also as he’s from Louisiana and – importantly – musically and stylistically at one with where he grew up and developed his sound. While great, the lazily-styled “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby" doesn’t sit well with the rest of the compilation. The Jan Hammer Group’s bubbling, dreamy 1977 single “Don’t You Know” (clearly an influence on Flying Lotus) also doesn’t gel with its companions and is presumably included as Hammer was later inextricably linked with the emblematic Miami Vice.

The compilers assert in their liner notes that this is an underrepresented or unacknowledged and now-influential genre, and the collection appears to be a mission statement. Of course, Too Slow to Disco is fun. An eye-opener too, and frequently terrific. But as a collection grappling with a piece of musical history which clearly needed rewriting, more rigour about what was included should have been exercised.

• Kieron Tyler’s blog

Overleaf: Listen to Ned Doheny’s “Get it up For Love” and Rupert Holmes’s “Deco Lady” from Too Slow to Disco

Listen to Ned Doheny’s “Get it up For Love” from Too Slow to Disco

Listen to Rupert Holmes’s “Deco Lady” from Too Slow to Disco