It’s About Time isn’t the only Chic album about to be released. It will shortly be sharing space on record shop shelves with The Chic Organisation 1977-79, a lavish box set containing the band’s first three albums alongside a collection of rarities, a facsimile of a promotional 12-inch and We Are Family, the 1979 Sister Sledge album that may well be the greatest Chic production of all. It comes complete with not one, not two but three essays by prominent cultural critics on Chic’s significance.
It was all noticeably different last time Chic released an album. In 1992, no one was in a rush to lavishly repackage their records or write scholarly essays about their importance. A critic who suggested they were one of the greatest bands of their era would have been going out on a limb. Their back catalogue was treated in the way you might expect a record label to treat the oeuvre of a band who hadn’t had a hit for 10 years: the nearest they came to an archival release was Megachic, a tacky medley of their hits apparently aimed squarely at the kind of person who enjoyed nothing more than donning an afro wig and demanding the DJ at the local 70s night play Rasputin by Boney M.
Something dramatic has happened to Chic’s reputation in the intervening decades. Quite rightly so, but you do wonder whether the elevation of their 70s back catalogue from remnant of the disco era to vast cultural importance has impacted on Nile Rodgers’ ability to make new music: it’s a tough call to add to a legacy that’s thought of in such lofty terms. Certainly, the length of gestation of the 10 songs here – including two versions of recent single Sober and a Lady Gaga-helmed remake of 1979’s I Want Your Love, originally commissioned for a Tom Ford fashion show – suggests a lot of deliberating about how it should sound: a new Chic album was announced over four years before It’s About Time’s final appearance.
You can appreciate Rodgers’ desire to make a modern pop record rather than something knowingly retro. He has spent the 21st century so far on a never-ending, hit-packed tour: perhaps few things instil a desire for contemporaneity quite like spending 15 years playing sets of songs from the 1970s, no matter how wonderful those songs are. But it puts him in the thankless position of attempting to update a timeless sound, with the aid of a curious supporting cast including pop singer and Pitch Perfect 2 actor Hailee Steinfeld, PC Music producer Danny L Harle, and Craig David. The results are often pretty brash and shrill: Auto-Tuned vocals; quantised, lockstepped rhythms; special guest vocalists all up in your grill, melismatically emoting as if it were going out of fashion, which, alas, it isn’t.
The guest artists are a particular problem when they’re tasked with writing words: the sound of rapper LunchMoney Lewis wanging on about getting drunk in the club seems desperately unsophisticated compared to the best of Chic’s lyrics, which were always more complex and anxious about dancefloor hedonism and African American aspiration than they first appeared. “You are now listening to Chic,” offers a voiceover early on, in imitation of the tongue-in-cheek lyrical branding found on Le Freak or Chic Cheer. But there are moments when it seems just as well they reminded you, when It’s About Time could be by pretty much anyone.
If it was all like that, then It’s About Time would be easier to regretfully dismiss. But it isn’t. Even when they the songs are nearly anonymous, Nile Rodgers’ guitar is buoyant and propulsive, and his playing is an unalloyed joy throughout. And there are points where the songwriting clicks, hitting a sweet spot between then and now. The opening Till the World Falls updates the escapist theme of 1979’s Good Times for an equally troubled era, albeit less subtly; I Dance My Dance, tellingly one of the tracks free of guest stars, is great. Your attitude to State of Mine (It’s About Time) may depend on your tolerance for jazz-funk instrumentals, but it sounds fantastic: rich, deep, subtly done and beautifully crafted, it fits with the classic Chic notion of music as a form of luxury goods. And there are nice moments: the way Boogie All Night unexpectedly crashes in with no intro, throwing the listener into the centre of the action; the strange but effective melding of the vocals of Emeli Sandé and Elton John on the ballad Queen; the unexpected, thrilling key change in the middle of the otherwise desultory Do You Wanna Party.
The album It’s About Time most obviously recalls is Giorgio Moroder’s Déjà Vu, on which another bona-fide genius boosted by Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories made a lunge for latterday relevance, with mixed results. You can entirely understand Rodgers’ desire to demonstrate he’s still a fully functioning hit-making machine in a different musical climate. Equally, it’s obvious that It’s About Time’s highlights come when it seems least bothered about going for the Top 40 jugular; when it sounds more like the work of a man with nothing left to prove, than a man trying to prove himself.
This week Alexis listened to
The first fruits from her forthcoming album Aviary: one of those moments where all Holter’s strangeness and idiosyncrasy coalesce into a fantastic, epic song.
