Hercules and Love Affair
http://music.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,2262864,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfrontAlexis Petridis
Friday March 7, 2008
The Guardian
Anyone feeling that music currently lacks a certain exoticism - awash as it is with prosaic mortgage indie and ordinary people elevated to star status by TV talent shows - should be heartened by the arrival of New York's Hercules and Love Affair. Their record company describes them as "a pan-sexual mix for our troubled times". That is one way of saying that Hercules and Love Affair are the kind of band in which guest vocalist Antony Hegarty - the Mercury prize-winning torch singer and radical gay performance artist, with a strong interest in gender reassignment - is the Charlie Watts figure: integral, but a bit stolid and suburban by contrast with his flamboyant bandmates. These include transsexual vocalist Nomi; dancer Shayne, a gay B-boy and mainstay of New York's voguing scene; and Kim Ann Foxmann, a Hawaiian lesbian jewellery designer famed for running a notorious club called Mad Clams, where one could apparently "get away with anything - smoking, sex, drugs, peeing in the corner, dancing naked".
