Quebec Connection

Making no attempt to cover up their whereabouts and cultural standpoint, Montreallers Quebec Connection have taken the fossil of Expo ’67 and used it to fuel their mid-tempo dance emergency. The engine of the project is Nathaniel Hebert, who straddles his lust for the charmingly rickety circuitry of ’60s and ’70s analog gear with one foot and the convenience of more recently manufactured computers with the other. With loaded pulsing, a variety of sharp and muffled sounds used to keep the beat, and voices so treated they’ve become robotic, Hebert delivers a lean and hip album. It’s somewhere between a hot date giving you the once over and coming up with no reaction and being enticed to the dance floor by a game of eye tag: it’s all at once icy and inviting. The simplicity of these combined elements yields something more mysterious, chic and disaffected than many other albums of its ilk.