In order to be everything to all people in rock, Coldplay have exorcised any kind of cultural esoterica from the counter-cultural indie they’ve adapted for the masses, so as not to alienate any one or other section of their audience. Reflected in their notoriously meaningless lyrics, their generic brand of indie rock is detached from any discernible cultural reference points (all traces of Jeff Buckley’s New York bohemia are redacted from their sound, for example, despite Buckley’s massive influence on the band). For Disclosure to apply the same method to house is fatal in the context of the genre because, unlike with indie rock, house ceases to be house the very moment you uproot it from its home – the club. 

Dis-house is very much in the vein of “dry-lander” dance; a throwaway but telling term used by early Croydon dubsteppers to describe dancefloor-averse home listeners. In an interview with New York’s 92.3 NOW, they had this to say: “We come from a very different background from dance producers. What separates us from them is that most producers started out by DJing, whereas we learnt to DJ long after we started to produce. We grew up learning instruments – bass guitar and drums – and that gives us a whole new perspective on things. We want to put a bit of soul back into the performance, rather than it being just a man in a booth.” 

There’s something inherently bogus in this sort of rhetoric. Club culture is something the brothers appear to have little affinity with, or even respect for. “When I was younger I just thought dance music was all shit. All of it.” Howard Lawrence told The Guardian last year. “Even now that I like it, I don’t really like crowds. Loads of slobbering, drunk people isn’t that fun when you’re not drunk. I love the music in the clubs we play, I just don’t necessarily love the people.” They also recently bemoaned the “really hot girls” who come to their shows to gurn on pills in the front row  – “You could all could look so pretty if you weren’t doing that.” Aren’t these people – these silly, drugged-up, sweaty people – the same one’s that are essentially paying their wages?

Personal comments can, of course, be picked apart ad nauseam, but we’d be approaching the Disclosure problem from the perspective of “judge the art, not the artist” were it not for the fact that this mentality of theirs finds its way into their music. Just because you may want to dance to ‘Latch’ or ‘White Noise’ does not make their music club music – or rather, “music of the club”. The spaces in which their music lives are the radio first, the festival stages second and the club last. 

The club is both sanctuary and breeding ground for one of house music’s key elements, fantasy; something that is wholly absent from the brothers’ limp, bothersome sound. Though emotive and wistful, it is devoid of house music’s sense of theatre: that life-or-death yearning for salvation that, in the genre’s heyday, was forever pitted against the quest for sexual gratification. An affront to America’s puritan establishment, overt sexuality was another precious mode of self-expression for house music’s ostracised queer. Dis-house, meanwhile, is house music stripped of its gay signifiers – the vamp, the lust-re, the air of corporeal dancefloor derangement. 

The club was a place where queerness could exist without curtailment, and where the black identity could consolidate as a network of inter-connected countercultural forces in ownership of their very own HQ. In being devoid of house music’s glamour and self-conscious artifice, Dis-house presents a domesticity that disregards the need to exist in a space beyond the 9-5: the space in which “the other” can find release. Though often described by apologists as “well-constructed”, Disclosure’s studiously ordered production sooner evokes the neat, cream living rooms of middle-class Surrey than any kind of juddering Chicago dance-orgy. 

Of crucial significance in the debate is a man who stands centre stage in all this, but whose opinion is either dismissed or censored. Sam Smith’s subordination to Disclosure’s vision is a study in the dangers of cleaving house music from its culture. When the Lawrence’s first listened to Smith’s early R&B ballads they assumed the Londoner was a woman, and were reportedly “shocked” to learn the truth. Why the fuck would anyone with even a basic understanding of club culture, let alone a pair of successful dance producers, make such a presumption – especially considering the fundamental role falsetto-voiced male divas played in formulating the house aesthetic? 

It comes as no surprise that Smith’s debut has therefore, though confessional in nature, been accused of “having nothing much to say”, and his voice criticised as “one-dimensional and inexpressive”. After all, what indeed can a gay house vocalist say – or be allowed to say – when unable to speak from that perspective? The Financial Time’s Ludavic Hunter wrote that “his soulful voice cries out for a more imaginative setting than the rote gospel-pop and balladry that the hotly tipped newcomer finds himself saddled with.” Perhaps the setting Hunter is thinking of is that club. Without that setting – figurative or otherwise – Smith’s art feels like house music’s queer voice repressed.

It’s not just the elements of sexuality that feel anaemic, either. Vocalists MNEK and A*M*E constitute Dis-house’s most discernible black voices, but when presented in the context of the music’s aestheticised blankness their contribution seems subsumed into a climate of cultural meaninglessness. It’s bitterly ironic that the Lawrence’s are quick to tell the press they are bringing some “soul” back to dance music production, whilst ignoring (or in some cases, doing a direct disservice to) the black soul tradition that became one of house music’s fundamental building blocks.

When they do make some sort of effort to honour the genre’s roots, the results are horrible. The use of the gospel-like exhortations of US motivational speaker Eric Thomas that open ‘When A Fire Starts To Burn’ feels like tokenistic lip service to the cultural origins of house, and that the boys’ devised the song’s accompanying promo-video based on Thomas as “tongue in cheek” is yet more indication of their casually facetious attitude towards a genre that they are actively re-appropriating. 

“We write conventionally written songs,” the duo said, “it just so happens we produce them like dance music.” Building “conventionally written songs” (i.e. narrational balladry) into electronic tracks is an easier task when the music is breaks-based (pop-esque drum ‘n’ bass’s very first chart entry, Baby D’s ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ is a fine example), and even the jagged masonry of half-step dubstep was receptive to pop re-structuring for a time (see Nero’s number one hit ‘Guilt’). Disclosure may have had more success than any pop artist of their ilk before them doing the same thing with 4/4 house, but what irks is how much of house is being sacrificed in the name of pop. Spiller’s ‘Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)’, Xpress 2’s ‘Lazy’ (featuring David Byrne on vocals) –  these are four-to-the-floor pop songs that got it right; able to court mass appeal without turning their backs on the club.

The Dis-house set are running out of time to improve matters. Their music is threatening to leap the Atlantic and locust the shit of North America (‘Latch’ recently made it to number 12 in America’s Billboard 100), and if it so happens that Dis-house penetrates the American market in its current form, we’re all in some seriously deep shit. And not the good kind of seriously deep shit like, say, Larry Heard. By then, the jelly will have set and duly been shipped out to every URL in 50 states, with a note enclosed: “This is the new sound of house-pop, and so shall it be for evermore.” In two years time, a new generation of Americans might be talking about this new genre invented in England called house, which is great for dancing to in fields. 

You can follow John Calvert on Twitter here: @JCalvert_music 

The opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of this publication. THUMP is proud to have produced two videos for Disclosure including ‘When A Fire Starts To Burn’ and ‘Grab Her’.