The Juan MacLean: "Feel So Good"

For my money, the best thing John MacLean has done and probably will ever do is an interview he gave last year to the New Gay. In the site’s sadly dormant “Ask a Straight Guy” segment, straight musicians touring the Washington D.C. area are given the heterosexual versions of questions only LGBT people seem to get, such as “When did you first realize you were straight?” and “What are the biggest challenges faced by a straight guy in today’s culture?” Most interviewees are content to give terse one-line answers and, I imagine, either pat themselves on the back for being so amazingly open and liberal or leave a nasty message with their PR people for making them do this shit. MacLean instead came up with a series of gay-positive, paragraph-long responses that were educated, eloquent, and funny. “I was shocked to hear from my six year old that she heard kids her age using [“gay”] inappropriately, and I have tried to impress upon them how hurtful this is.” Someone register this man to vote in California.

The Juan MacLean, MacLean’s band/alter ego, has been one of the mainstays of DFA since its inception in 2002, but while Less Than Human (2005) and its early 12” singles were decent stuff, there was little outside of Nancy Whang’s singing to distinguish them from the handful of anonymous electropunk artists in the label’s stable. “Happy House” was the turning point, a 12-minute unabashed house track that closed last year’s The Future Will Come and demonstrated a MacLean dissatisfied with pumping out semi-danceable fodder for a third DFA compilation. Future had more than a hint of prototypical James Murphy production, especially in the percussion, but on the whole it signaled a move for the group’s music in a far brighter and more tuneful direction.

“Feel So Good,” which may now be a close contender for my favorite MacLean moment, at the least an easy number two, will appear on the Juan MacLean’s upcoming DJ-Kicks mix and follows up “Happy House” with not only a variation on its theme, but with a similar mindset: the track lasts 10-plus minutes and its drowsy, languid groove should make time on the club play charts all but inevitable. “Feel So Good”’s synth hook uses the same long-long-short rhythm as “Happy House”‘s dance hall piano, but, if anything, it’s more effective this time around—where the acoustic piano on “House” is (intentionally) sloppy and blends into the backing track on occasion, the crisp staccato of its digitized counterpart here pierces through the mix while MacLean tinkers with the filtering and volume. And the track may very well have Whang’s best vocal performance yet, her simple, catchy eighth-note runs leading into off-beat “much, much / hush, hush” tags that track the rhythm of the synth line at half speed. This is complex stuff assembled beautifully, and, eight years on, it’s about time MacLean stopped trying to beat Murphy at his own dead horse.