Tiger & Woods – The Nest, London 20/01/12

Tiger & Woods delivered the best dance album of 2011, but you may not know that yet. With little in the way of promotion in the UK, it’s on their web presence that they rely, and those in the know have all turned out tonight – though to be fair Dalston probably accounts for 85% of their audience already.

But in a pitch-black basement there’s barely room to shake your thang with the visit of mysterious and super-cool US disco house duo Larry Tiger and David Woods (ha), and not just because it’s a Friday night hipster joint; the choice cuts from album Through The Green are greeted like club classic staples. Which to all intents they are – for tunes such as ‘Kissmetellme’ and ‘Gin Nation’ have the depth, freshness and goddamn funk to stand alongside ‘One More Time’ and ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ in the realms of timeless floorfillers of the last 20 years.

Though it’s rarely as explicit as with the aforementioned Imagination-splicing doozy, T&W’s art lies in their sample mastery, or more so the intricate construction and layers that are introduced with subtlety but which creep in then suddenly overwhelm. With anonymity retained through baseball caps, heads down and matching moustaches, David and Larry are as energised as the crowd, and do more than just wheel out the album, expanding on the irresistible teasers that punctuate ‘Through The Green’ and incredibly making it even more thrilling.

There’s no respite either, yet it never is it monotonous or laboured; the only given is that T&W will pull out every trick in the book on how to rock the party, and then some that aren’t even in there yet. It’s wholly accessible, expert in structure and about the most fun you could hope to have with a dance record. It’s also surely destined for a broader audience judging by the buzz that surrounds their mere presence tonight.