Album Of The Week: The Juan Maclean In A Dream

On Twitter last week, the writer Rich Juzwiak posted this: "There is shit on the Juan MacLean album that sounds like soulful house if they removed the soul and left the corpse singing." Rich meant that as a dismissal of the album, but it also gets at what I like about it. The new In A Dream is the Juan Maclean's first album since the former LCD Soundsystem member Nancy Whang joined John MacLean and turned the former solo project into a duo, and her influence on the album is profound. Whang was always, quite obviously, the coolest motherfucker onstage at LCD Soundsystem shows, and her unflappable, seen-it-all demeanor comes through in her vocals. On In A Dream, her voice is flatter and less impressed than I've ever heard it. And so the album works as a grand experiment. Whang, at this point, is the latest in a grand lineage of dead-eyed, hardass downtown New York singer ladies; she's joined a tradition that includes Nico and Kim Gordon and, like, everyone in Luscious Jackson. And In A Dream is what happens when you throw a singer like that into a genre of music famous for its ferociously demonstrative gospel-trained singers. It's an album of contrasts, a musical equivalent to Icy-Hot.