This past Friday, The Mercury Lounge turned into the Mercury Disco as two bands known for driving dance provided blessed out sounds for the button down crowd that had assembled that night. New York’s The Golden Filter was in to help celebrate the late April release of their first album Voluspa giving us a taste of dream vocals and electro rhythms that provoke some very Earthly desires.

The Golden Filter is very much a product of New York, boasting an Australian vocalist, Penelope Trappes and an Ohioan expat programmer, Stephen Hindman. The duo produce music that is something like Soulwax meets Giorgio Moroder, but unfortunately with some rather weak singing. The music bubbles and bloops with driven bass and swooping synth washes give a neodisco soundscape which is unfortunately a bit hindered by the standard vocals. There’s no passion, no energy behind Penelope’s singing, but neither is it cold and detached, it calls to mind the limp singing of epic trance where the voice was fueled by effects and processing rather than any actual talent on the behalf of the singer. A triumph of studio wizardry over the fallibility of man.

This isn’t to say that Penelope Trappes can’t sing, she hits a variety of notes with a club filling volume, but it never feels like what she sings is vital to the music and at times it threatens to overwhelm what is very good music indeed. I was interested to see how it would translate onstage, and I was a bit concerned that it would be “dude with laptop girl with microphone” but thankfully that wasn’t too much of a concern.

The opening act, The Hundred In the Hands was basically every Ibiza compilation from 2002 – 2005 before electrohouse rose from the discarded ashes of the indie dance scene and set its tendrils around the throats of the dance scene like the Boston Strangler, replacing Balearic tunes with off beat wave form bass. Standard kick hat kick hat kick hat kick hat measures leading to phrases leading to the next song. Washes of guitars and bass processed with delay and reverb like shoegaze while the synthlines worked their way up and down the dance music fake book producing some of the most disposable songs I’ve heard yet this year.

I was bored to tears until the last song, which I think was “Dressed In Dresden” which is an absolute stormer of a track that sounded nothing like the rest of the set. If more of the music was like that final track with the distorted growling bass line and crystal clear guitar line, they would have been able to maintain my interest, but unfortunately it came across more like Now That’s What I Call Ibiza Vol 3. I’ll be honest, it’s interesting and I’ll keep an eye on it for the future, but I can’t recommend it to anyone just yet.

The Golden Filter’s set up was Penelope Trappes singing with Stephen Hindman covering a variety of instruments and the addition of a live drummer to provide additional rhythmic elements. The went through and replaced all the filters on the lights from the blue they were to red and yellow which they then shone directly in the audience’s eyes for the majority of the set when they weren’t abusing the strobe lights behind the band.

The sound quality was great, every thing was clean and the bass and percussion were full and powerful, propelling the dancers, a bit timidly at first, but then clusters of dancers infected the rest of the crowd and soon most of the audience was moving in time with an enthusiasm unexpected for the later show.

However, this energy did not last as something I’ve never seen before happened. After The Golden Filter played their popular song “Solid Gold” a near Nordic electro heart breaker of a track, nearly half the audience left. Just up and bolted. It was surreal. The audience that stayed until the end was there for good though as we all moved together, getting sweatier and sweatier until they ended for the night.