The twin engines that drive the best dance music — an all-together/all-alone duality of euphoria stalked by sadness, of the frisson achieved by mixing human voices and sentiments with machine-made soundscapes — may be familiar devices, but they work their strange, sepulchral alchemy surprisingly rarely. Too often, DJs, producers and musicians opt for the easy route, but such laziness also guarantees that those determined to dig deeper and range wider — including, in recent years, MGMT, Midnight Juggernauts, Passion Pit, Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours and Animal Collective’s dizzy-makingly wonderful Merriweather Post Pavilion — stand out a mile. Joining the front ranks come this Spanish band, with a new album that ambushes, mystifies, haunts and enthrals as powerfully as any of the above-mentioned.
That it would be perfectly possible to play Subiza and drift by in a haze of only semi-engagement is not quite the faint praise such an observation implies: so much of the greatest dance music plays this trick, lulling you into a sort of narcotic reverie before jolting you with a chord sequence, a ghostly vocal, a repetition, a change of tempo that is all the more shattering for having emerged from such complacent, escapist daydreaming. On songs such as Grow, Real Love and Infinite Desert, Delorean fashion, from often rudimentary Balearic, synth-pop, hip-hop and Italian-house staples, something both ephemeral and profound.