Both Andy Stott 12-inches from late 2011, We Stay Together and Passed Me By, have gotten a second pressing by Modern Love, hopefully the second of many. I grabbed both of 'em this time, and I haven't played anything else for the last 72 hours. Already $20 apiece is seeming like a real bargain. I'll spend $40 easy on a meal for the family at some run-down restaurant, and we only get to eat that once. These records are much more nourishing, and I can play them again, and again, and again. Bass is food. I'm devouring We Stay Together right now. So far, whichever one is playing is the one I like better, back and forth, forth and back. I don't know when I'm going to want to listen to anything else, because I am luxuriating in these deep, heavy grooves. Now I'm listening to Passed Me By and man, the second track on here, appropriately titled "New Ground"... I've listened to it 6 or 7 times since yesterday and it's still CRUSHING me. Absurdly, comically heavy and brilliantly EQ'd for vinyl. Yes, the music is dark ("dark enough to call 'evil'"), but I think if you get all the way into these rhythms, you find a surprisingly warm and embracing core radiating outwards. Certainly these records are funky as hell, and however slow and dragged-out the rhythms are, almost every track is fun to dance to. I mean, I love Demdike Stare, but they really do not make me feel like dancing... Stott surprisingly does. Also, just for kicks, I've been trying to work out if these two releases, taken together as four 12" singles, are to the beginning of the 2010s what Metal Box (three 12" singles) was to the beginning of the 1980s, as far as "dark" disco music would or should sound like in a post-(post-post-)punk world. By now, Stott's time, we are rid of the albatross completely, that is, the need for a frontman, a singer, a cover model, a cult of personality. In that respect, techno made a big advancement past rock. Anyway, these records are available from Forced Exposure. (Currently at "low stock level"!)