Words by Aaron Coultate

Listening to the Phenomenal Hand Clap Band’s debut album is a surreal experience, like stepping into some kind of musical time machine. Press play and suddenly you’re at a San Francisco acid party in 1967. A haze of smoke fills the air, there’s an orgy going on, like, right next to you, and hippies are sprawled across the room in varying states of consciousness.

Then it’s back to the age of disco – New York circa ‘78, and suddenly you’re dancing in the Paradise Garage and Larry Levan is on the decks. Flash back 15 years and now you’re in a deserted roadhouse diner somewhere on Interstate 76, lamenting lost love. You hear a soulful voice come from the battered radio in the kitchen and all your troubles melt away.

That, in a nutshell, is the Phenomenal Hand Clap Band. Formed by New York DJs Daniel Collás and Sean Marquand, it’s a loose collective of more than 20 musicians and vocalists who effortlessly fuse disco, funk, soul, rhythm and blues and psychedelia. In recording the band’s debut album, Collás and Marquand have called on an absurdly talented supporting cast, which includes members of bands as diverse as TV on the Radio, L’Trimm, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mooney Suzuki and Sí Se.

The highlights of the album are as numerous as they are varied. I Been Born Again sounds like something out of the soundtrack to the musical Hair – and I mean that as a compliment – while the impossibly catchy 15 to 20 blends disco and Brazilian funk into a ready-made dance floor hit. Tears – the track I had in mind in the diner on Interstate 76 – brims with ’60s soul, while the come-hither vocals in Testimony make it an early contender for the best “take me to the bedroom now” track of the year.

These guys may evoke images of days gone by, but thankfully they are very much in the here and now. And, fingers crossed, there’s plenty more to come (Tummytouch, 2009).