The Juan Maclean

In a parallel universe, tonight’s gig is a mailing list invite-only warm up date for The Juan Maclean’s imminent 3000+ capacity venue tour. Their support band is a band hoping to make the big time called Friendly Fires and the atmosphere is so expectant, it’s likely to drop twins at any moment. They arrive on stage in a haze of smoke, deliver a stunning set encompassing three decades of dance music and leave us wanting more.

Sadly, upon checking the Ikea furniture I’m sat on and the weekend engineering work schedule, I realise that this is very much not that universe. It’s one in which this largely unknown American troupe continue to make excellent music, continue to play excellent live shows and continue to get strangely overlooked.

Tonight’s set largely stems from their most recent Eighties-tinged record The Future Will Come and focuses on its more upbeat, instrument-heavy songs (probably largely due to there being four members on stage). ‘The Simple Life’ is a frenetic mix of high speed drumming, a pounding electro bassline and layered, slightly awkward, mixed sex harmonies. ‘No Time’ employs an incessant piano line under it’s surface that seems to form a vocal line of it’s own to support Nancy Whang’s coolly delivered chorus. And the Human League-esque single ‘One Day’ gets the rousing, extended outro that it so desperately deserves - allowing Whang’s prevalent voice to echo around the room like an otherworldly siren.

Their debut record Less Than Human gets a minor look in too, with its standout track ‘Give Me Every Little Thing’ getting a full on funk going and ‘Tito’s Way’ benefitting greatly from the extra live musicians. In fact, it’s a little surprising how well the material from such differing records melds together.

It comes as a massive surprise however when the band unleashes their opus – ‘Happy House’ - after a mere five songs. It feels too early to be reaching this kind of a climax. And so the song builds… and builds… and builds. Four minutes in, we’ve taken in the most joyously postmodern ode to Nineties house created this decade. Eight minutes in, Whang is wailing "launch me into space" to the heavens and doing some cool-as-fuck® delayed looping of her output. Ten minutes in, the engines of a rocket ship ignite and the sound mutates into a hardcore rave, getting louder and louder and louder. At the fourteen minutes mark, the recorded song would be over, but in the flesh its now veered off course and is having a seizure, spitting out traces of electro and Nineties dance. Twenty minutes, the room is noticeably warmer and sweatier. Twenty five, we start to understand why this is their last song, and before the thought is fully realised the music veers off again into some kind of LCD Soundsystem ‘Yeah’ like breakdown. Finally, thirty minutes in, there is a rapturous round of applause and we gather our breath.

The band do manage to make it back on stage for a brief encore, but technical issues blight the finale and besides, we’re all still in shock. It feels like the band has been on stage for mere moments, yet 30 years of pleasure were distilled into the most joyous half hour Cargo has witnessed for some time.