The average band has a natural disdain for the subgenre or scene they’re inevitably lumped into. It’d take a certain amount of misguided confidence to ask a band like Small Black or Washed Out what it feels like to be a ‘chillwave’ artist – reductive generalizations like that tend to ward off musicians in fears of being pigeonholed. However that standard hasn’t carried over to Long Distance Analog, who’ve adopted their newly-minted moniker of *ahem* ‘nu-disco’ with a curious amount of love – to the point of plastering the term all over their myspace – it’s a curious marriage, but the Detroit-based project seems to have a genuine love for the scene they more or less solely inhibit.

It’s not like its inaccurate, Long Distance Analog’s Walk The Night EP is exactly what it advertises, vintage disco grooves and chilled, smoke-lounge ambience combined with stabbing, 21st century synth. It quite intentionally sounds like old music being played with new instruments – opener ‘You Got The Look’ is essentially an smarmy talk-box jam with the bitrate and drum machines updated, like the funkiest Daft Punk cut you’ve ever heard. ‘Need Somebody To Funk’ moves deeper into Prince-ville, guitar squiggles and barely-disguised sex-metaphors abound, it just avoids contrivance and actually gets some hips swinging on a post-ironic level.

It’s hard to introduce keytars and space-station bleeps and keep your band out of cruise-ship territory, but Long Distance Analog does a pretty good job of that. The songs dip mainly when project-mastermind Curtis Black drops his flared-collar voice over the fully-fitted beats, his voice doesn’t add suave nor sex appeal and becomes simply the scenester behind the curtain, treated and manicured but lacking any personality – better off sinking into the lush sonic environment he’s already created. The best example of this third cut ‘Shadow Crawler’ which for the first minute is an icy, funked-out banger that gets a hell of a lot less likable when Black croons a greasy “You make your way around the town, girl // Selling out your personality to help you pay the bills.” The first-class instrumental reduces to a bumbling background for Curtis’ deadbeat philosophical runs and naturally knocks the song down a few notches.

Whether the focus on his voice has something to do with an unchecked ego or not we’ll probably never know, but it is fair to say that Walk The Night and makes a pretty good case for its existence in the span of four songs. Besides the annoyances, Black is onto something here, cool-out disco is long overdue for some sort of a revival, and technology makes it shine and subdue in new ways. Long Distance Analog deserves the Nu Disco tag they graciously fill their genre column with.