The Feast of the Broken Heart

Although Feast comes packed with Europeans and expats (Butler currently calls Vienna home), the rhythms strike with Yankee assertiveness, the vocals now direct yet far more diverse.

Each song’s darker instrumental aesthetics balance the fun with an undercurrent of rumination.

Gustaph and Rouge Mary also prove to be ideal foils for Butler, who still makes his songs tight, powerful, and optimally shaped.

There’s more than enough contained within to confirm Butler’s genius at resurrecting the early spirit of house music. This will be the soundtrack to many a party over the summer months.

There's more than enough subtlety here to mean it isn't just a collection of club cuts.

Think ‘Step Up’ from ‘Blue Songs’, developed full-length.

Viewed as a showcase of reinvention The Feast Of The Broken Heart is a success. Judged as a cohesive album, it’s far tighter than their previous long-player and repeat listens do indeed find new, exciting depths and melodies at play.

Like Hercules’s first two records, Feast transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience.

The house and techno elements are immediate and occasionally aggressive, but there’s great warmth and intimacy here as well.

Butler has sculpted a complete, resolute collection of high-grade dance music.

While Butler has for the most part an uncanny ability to match singer to material, his own personal lyrical touch is left slightly remote (he co-wrote many of the songs with his collaborators). Instead, he's a curator par excellence who's once again assembled an aggressive and varied collection of voices who together form an earnest plea to choose compassion over division.

As a daytime collection of songs this album has its faults, but as long as it's consumed after hours, preferably in a club, it excels with a persona charged with swirls of unbound desire and dance friendly dazzle.

Consciously retro, sure, but more convincingly so than Disclosure and similar young bucks.

Butler's troupe have always been unique--a dance floor-friendly manifestation of the dissenting, politicised queer underground--but now they're making transcendent music again, too.

There’s very little sense of a uniting personality, and you’re left wondering how genuinely great an album H&LA might make, how much more they would feel like a band rather than a conceptual project, if they cut loose as much as they do on ‘The Key’.

[The album] is most notable for two typically saturnine contributions from unlikely electro diva John Grant. [Jun 2014, p.98]

Butler's gang of misfits may fall further below the radar on the back of this, but artistically he's on to something. [Jun 2014, p.112]

Sure, appearances by resident clever sad boy John Grant and Belgian singer Gustaph stir the pot a little (particularly on the catchy lead single "Do You Feel the Same?") but ultimately the final package ends up fading into rhythmic background music.