Send "Escort " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The studio must be an oasis for Dan Balis and Eugene Cho, the leaders of Escort, New York's premier live disco ensemble. Do you have any idea how hard it is to play this stuff in a club without coming off like rank amateurs or soulless professionals? You have to be tighter-than-tight to replicate those metronomic rhythms, while also being loose enough to play through any in-the-moment human glitches. You can't wrong-foot dancers, but you also can't be so precision-tooled that you lose the sense of abandon that's essential to any good party. You're not competing with a drum machine, which is tough enough to do. You're competing with Nile Rodgers' Chic, a much more forbidding proposition.In the safety of a recording booth, a band like Escort is allowed to flub multiple takes, correct any mistakes, and experiment without worrying about bringing the party down from its boil. They can tinker with their lush arrangements until they fit with the jigsaw-precision that was required of disco bands in the genre's pre-computer heyday. Escort is the result of all that fieriness and fine-tuning, the band's debut album after a drawn-out series of singles, teasing fans for more than half a decade. On the evidence, Balis and Cho are two producers who've listened long and hard to the history of their favorite genre, and who care about getting both the little details and the overall Broadway-meets-boogie vibe just right. They manage to replicate every Off the Wall horn blast and Patrick Cowley synth bubble with loving music geek precision. But Escort isn't just the pinnacle of 21st-century disco fetishism. (Though it would be a singular achievement even if it were.) It's a great pop album, even if it's working off 1979's pop template rather than 2011's. Balis and Cho aren't quite up to Chic's level, obviously, as songwriters or players. But they've set themselves a similar task, out to prove that refinement and abandon aren't mutually exclusive. Like disco the first time around, Escort aims directly for the brain's pleasure centers, particularly the one marked "bubblefunk," but there's also an intensity and attention to sound design that comes from being both an in-the-moment live unit and studio rat tinkerers. All this astounding detail work is there to add extra thrills to songs that are instantly accessible, immediately charming. Rather than 12"-friendly extended disco remixes, these cuts are shaved down to the essentials. And the grooves would be strong enough with half the bells and whistles....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Some albums only need three-word reviews, like "fun and dumb." New York neo-disco outfit Escort's self-titled debut is both fun and dumb in almost annoyingly perfect proportion. Pieced together from about a half-decade's worth of material, Escort never appears to aspire to anything other than pastiche, but the glitziest, ritziest, most New Years Eve-iest pastiche imaginable. On tracks like their midtempo, cowbell-draped debut single, "Starlight," and the percolating "Caméleon Chameleon," Escort (by most accounts more a collective than a traditional band, boasting a population in the high teens) wears their anonymity like a badge of credibility an invitation to drop in—no, make that sit in—on the friendliest, least exclusive uptown party. The Escort crew is ditzy enough to sell lyrics like "Give it to me, say it to me, work it with me/If you're ready, I'm about to pop ah-ahhh-all through the night." But they're also either smart or attentive enough to steer their tributes less toward the guiding lights of Hall of Famers whose reputations need no flattery (i.e. Donna Summer, Off the Wall, "I Will Survive") and more toward the sort of boilerplate disco that allegedly ruined the party the first time around. In something like an act of reclamation, Escort's string of hustlin' ditties suggests a reunion of the production-songwriting geniuses that could be found in the houses of Salsoul, West End, and especially Prelude Records. The rhythm guitars and string section interjections of "Cocaine Blues" ride a straightforward bassline with a familiar mix of routine craftsmanship and the sort of efficiency that, long ago, would've cut six or seven LPs in the span of one week. The piano explosions that accentuate a chorus of females singing in syncopated unison during the chorus of "Love in Indigo" couldn't be more reminiscent of Musique if Escort's singers slipped into a refrain of "Push, push in the bush." The seven-and-a-half-minute closer "Karawane" is, like some of the best pseudo-ethno disco, only mildly flavored with Latino rhythmic flourishes and African tribal chants....full text |
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