January 18, 2002

Midnight Funk Association : Coffee Shop Rules

Old school techno. But kind of nice...

That old journalistic cliché 'timeless' can be glowing praise in the correct
circumstances - usually when writing about guitar music, where an inherent
shackling to tradition makes a brisk skate across rock eras a relatively
simple task. Dance music, however, is still supposed to aspire to
progression. So the fact that the debut LP from Brit-techno duo Midnight
Funk Association could have been made any time in the last ten years isn't a
terrific compliment.

Not that there's much wrong with Mark Broom and Dave Hill's splicing of
speaker-damage breaks, cerebral hip-hop flourishes and tunnel-visioned
loops. 'For The Hips' and 'Sexy Way' sound primed to induce instantaneous
orgasm in big rooms the length of the nation. While for pure
arena-straddling, sci-fi techno thrills, 'Last Time' is exemplary - the only
thing missing, in fact, is the Hartnoll brothers' songwriting credit on the
sleeve.

Scant innovation, then, and little progression apparent from their days as
early-'90s Mo' Wax mainstays. A few moments -- like 'Way Back', a twisted
convocation of deep-space humming and depth-charge breakbeats - suggests
great things still to come from MFA. But it took them nearly a decade to
create 'Coffee Shop Rules', and the result feels less like writers' block
than sleeping sickness.

Noel Gardner