In the middle of the sweaty, happy crowd dancing Wednesday at the Echo, a man in a straw boater and fancy silk cravat held aloft a majestic yellow fan. Imaginative onlookers might have thought it was the Spirit of Disco, come down to bless Hercules and Love Affair, the Brooklyn-based ensemble onstage. Embossed, colorful fans were an emblem of early disco, when the subculture still thrived in multiracial, gay-dominated clubs, before it became suburbanized. Dancers used them to beat the heat in time-traveling style.
Hercules and Love Affair time-travels too: through lyrics that evoke Greek mythology and in music that touches on peak moments in club music's history, especially early 1970s New York. During that long-forgotten, recently revived period, DJs spun a dazzlingly eclectic range of music for devotees bent on finding a slice of utopia on the dance floor.
Hercules -- the brainchild of 29-year-old DJ Andy Butler -- seeks to match the artistic ambition and spiritual awareness of that golden age while incorporating the lessons of what came later, from Eurodisco to deep house to hitmakers such as Bronski Beat and Dee Lite. Unlike many young groups that reference disco, Hercules is earnest and bent on beauty, not camp. Its self-titled debut album, released in March, is a song cycle that uses the story of the Greek strongman and his lover Hylas to explore themes of loneliness, pride and survival.
