Pitchfork

"Like the Seminole, Navajo, Kickapoo/ Like those Indians, I'm an Indian too." These are words you will find rolling around your mind, for reasons all out of sorts, after listening to the maniacally infectious disco of August Darnell. (Prepare, too, to take stock of the Chippewa, Iroquois, Omaha, and Sioux, lest other tribes go underrepresented.) The couplet comes from "I'm an Indian Too" by Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band, one of many acts commanded by Darnell during an era when disco knew no bounds. It certainly didn't on any of the tracks compiled on Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983, a collection of stuttering, stately, and studiously weird disco songs that have to be heard to be believed. Darnell was involved in Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band before branching out as a writer/producer for other acts (many on the fabled crypto-disco label Ze Records) and then for his own group Kid Creole & the Coconuts. Common to them all are theatrical airs, irrepressible grooves, and fateful moments, however subtle or pronounced, that give rise to reactions classifiable only as WTF?!?!

The new compilation starts with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band's "Sunshower", a spritzy song that has become ubiquitous thanks to samples by Ghostface and M.I.A., among others. From there, Going Places goes places where idiosyncrasy and ambition reign. The title track, by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, struts through a funky mix of rhythm guitar and dryly shaken cymbals before breaking for a vibraphone solo and an eerie few-note guitar refrain that plays like something out of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". In "Is That All There Is?", singer Cristina broods about nightlife boredom with coy high-style jadedness before assenting to "let's keep dancing" (and this in the midst of a musique concrète interlude complete with cuckoo clock and restless crowd sounds).

Some of the songs on Going Places were made for dance-theater projects in the East Village in the 1980s, but one gets the sense that, for Darnell, a blank reel of tape was as conducive to theatricality as any commissioned stage. The parade of vocalists on display-- snappy divas, choruses of kids, uncertain guys who sound like they were just pulled away from sweeping up the studio-- makes for an uncommonly wide range of expression. And the music follows suit. The disco-vocal histrionics in Machine's "There But for the Grace of God Go I", so intense you can practically see the veins rising on the singers' foreheads, sound calm compared to a synth-streaked instrumental breakdown with sweaty funk guitars and blitzing bass runs too controlled to worry over mere concerns of the humanly realm. A similar mood plays out in slow songs like Aural Exciters' "Emile (Night Rate)", which cycles through a carnival of ideas without rising above a simmer.

The most striking aspect of Going Places is how little a sense of novelty figures into songs so outrageously playful and weird. The bizarre parts are never bizarre for no reason, and they're played (often by many, many band members) with too much spirit and skill to rate as stunts. It's hard to imagine dance music half as grand and imaginative being made today. But then, August Darnell would be hard to account for in any era.