Aziz Sucks.

More recycled Soundcheck content. Look, I’ve just moved to NYC. I’ll be going to plenty of shows real soon. I’ll have proper content on here in a bit. I swear I’m good for it.

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Johan Agebjörn, the proverbial wizard behind the curtain, is a dude who keeps it real: in spite of Sally Shapiro’s rapid rise to musicblog prominence, his personal website has refreshingly candid Top 10 lists devoted to his heroes and inspirations. While a catalogue of his favorite classic Italo Disco tracks comes as no surprise, experimental pioneers Aphex Twin and Squarepusher (and even his top ten drum machine sounds) get their shoutouts too. Agebjörn remains explicitly aware of his roots, and Disco Romance benefits immensely from his respectful and detail-oriented hand.Few “modern” albums so successfully assert a retro authenticity: snares and handclaps ring out into a snow-damped soundscape which is at once expansive and hushed. Precise synth stabs and driving basslines provide an anchor without overpowering the mix, exemplifying the muted crispness that points both to the album’s eurodance origins and to the analog warmth of Agebjörn’s ambient-informed production. The album’s diffuse, lo-fi haze is, in effect, its savior: were this album treated with modern studio gloss, it would immediately parody itself. The production even manages to save “Anorak Christmas” — a Scandinavian twee-ballad reworked into a disco Christmas carol — from a campy death.

Ironically, if anything threatens to intrude upon the album’s windowside introspection, it’s the very vocals that initially inspired the project. At its most sublime, Shapiro’s down-soft voice disperses like frostbreath, echoing into the perpetual background of keyboard choirs and strings. However, at times it rasps with inadequately compressed sibilance, growing downright punishing at bop-out volumes. Disappointing, given the attention paid to the instrumentation: one would figure that if Agebjörn is willing to saddle tracks like “Jackie Jackie (Spend This Winter With Me)” with front-and-center dramatic monologues, his treatment of Shapiro’s touted vocals would follow suit.

As passionate as Agebjörn is about Italo Disco (very), it bears noting that most of his musical output falls in the minimalist, ambient vein: in spite of the driving bass and the punchy snares, the album’s tone remains pensive and wistful; it explicitly conjures a sense of wind-blasted solitude. Simply, this isn’t dance music. Disco Romance is less a dancepop album than an ambient tribute to Italo Disco. Granted, ambient tracks don’t modulate a half-step or drop a vocoder to get in One More Chorus, but pop songs rarely stretch out to six minutes without growing unforgivably dull.

Ultimately, though, the album supersedes such concerns as the minutia of musical history and genre lines. In the same fashion as would-be cratemates Air & Stereolab, open celebration of Sally Shapiro’s connection to past electronic acts amounts to retro-driven remodernization, rather than self-dating graverobbing. For all the perverse joy Disco Romance affords hair-splitting historians, it offers significantly more as a well-composed electronic album than an anthropological study; rare are the albums that so effectively inspire emotive contemplation and foot-tapping in equal measure.