Album Review: Breakbot - By Your Side

By Your Side is Breakbot's debut album and, after producing a handful of EPs and a bucket load of remixes, it is a deliberately spacey take on late '70s disco, combining elements of French house, soul and funk. The majority of the tracks are composed of funky jazz guitar riffs and blissed out strings supplying cheese laden melodies over upbeat, but at times lacklustre and frustratingly repetitive snare driven pop beats. This is most evident in the opening track Break Of Dawn, which sounds like the backing to a montage from Rocky II.

As the record progresses, Jackson 5-esque guest vocals from Ruckazoid, and soulful vocals from Pacific! help cement the feeling that you're stuck in a dimly lit hall grooving your powder blue bellbottoms across block colour tiles. The production on the majority of the tracks is excessively clean almost bordering on clinical, which creates songs that force you to tap along whilst taking out the exciting unpredictability found on some of the better tracks on this album. 

The moments that really shine are the few tracks not sporting guest vocals, where Breakbot seems less limited and creates intimate interesting infusions of toned down vocals with spatterings of large brass sounds, self-indulgent guitar solos, and smooth jazz pianos. These breakthrough moments are especially evident on Intersection and Easy Fraction. As a whole By Your Side is a highly repetitive album filled with disco anthems that would have driven the kids wild 35 years ago, but today is little more than a tribute to the death of the dancehall.