The sweat descends.
The last time Com Truise played London was a far too early slot at Field Day - well it was a reasonable time but due to queuing issues a fair few people (myself included) missed him. Prior to that he played Madame JoJo’s the bowdlerised den of iniquity. In many ways SoHo’s premier red velvet upholstered venue was a perfect fit for the seedy, sweaty ‘slo-motion funk’ that Com Truise trades in. Tonight at Corsica Studios is sweaty too, but for far less sordid reasons. Com’s third trip across the Atlantic to London in less than a year has yielded a sold-out, ram packed room of bodies grinding and writhing away in sweat slicked harmony.
Com Truise is a tough looking guy from New York, who grew up in New Jersey and looks like it. If you were going to do one of those word clouds for key influences and key words things like '80s, Hip Hop and drum machine would feature prominently, but so too would Boards of Canada, pornography and Vangelis. Seth Haley produces light melodies seem to bounce of hard bass foundations, sex (sometimes sensual, sometimes sordid) features heavily in a mix of dark dankness and polished sheen that is quite beguiling.
Less than a year ago Seth Haley had just given up a job as an in-house designer for a pharmaceuticals company. He’d been making music for more than a decade under various different monikers but Com Truise stuck and it seems to have paid off. The room was never less than going wild, in a languid sort of way. A recently released a collection of early tracks, illustrates brilliantly the effect of ditching the day job, a fuller more individually realised sound and the reason we're here tonight - apologies if you're here to read about the latest innovations for Methoxycytoflaxacilin packaging.
Sweat is the word here, not the anxious nervous kind of sweat, think more of slow grooves, dark rooms and the sweat at the base of your spine. Sexy sweat. The stage at Corsica has raised Haley above the crowd, like some kind of lecherous preacher in a pulpit of seediness. Tracks like VHS Sex get the crowd’s approval, with yelps of orgasmic delight twisted and stretched into almost pornographic melodies. Flightwave and Air Cal are greeted like pop classics, rather than the rolling deep ambient funk they are – away from the album, they blend beats almost verge on drill and bass with a kind of 80s fetishism that is more akin to The Knife’s original version of Heartbeats. So groove-some is Com Truise’s sound that even the occasional (repeated) technical hitch isn’t enough to knock him off kilter for more than a couple of bars.
Taking the laid back vibe of the album and giving it an edge suits a live experience of Com Truise, the tease and nods and winks transformed from coyness to physical sensual experience.By the time he reluctantly comes back for an encore – beaming at a crowd that moves as one heaving mass of pheromones – it doesn’t feel like he could take us anywhere higher. But Brokerdale, with its creepy advice to guys looking to pick up chicks on the beach is almost the apotheosis of a night that has seen grooves so deep they are almost horizontal. Now I’m off to towel myself dry.
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