Hear Disco-Funk Group Escort’s Dancey St. Vincent Cover
As New York disco-funk collective Escort continue to record the follow-up to their 2012 eponymous debut, the group has shared a bubbly cover of St. Vincent‘s chugging 2009 single “Actor Out of Work” from Actor.
Escort released the more pop-driven track “If You Say So” with MNDR last month, yet the B-side “Actor,” which premiered on Stereogum, blends the group’s disco leanings with New Wave, trading in Annie Clark’s electric guitar for Soft Cell-worthy synths. Vocalist Adeline Michèle channels your favorite Nineties house diva to turn the original’s biting delivery into a club belter.
This isn’t the first time the 17-piece group has taken on someone else’s work. In 2011, the group released “Cocaine Blues,” an orchestral disco track that cribbed lyrics from reggae singer Dillinger’s 1983 track “Cocaine in My Brain” and a funky guitar riff from the People’s Choice’s “Do It Any Way You Wanna.”
The group has yet to reveal if their recent output will appear on their next album or just function as a stopgap for fans. Their disco-drenched debut was impressive enough to make Rolling Stone‘s 50 Best Albums of 2012, where the band was described as “channel[ing] the sleek, sexy sound of Studio 54 at its peak, down to the last high-hat and brass flourish.”
“Part of it was like, ‘Let’s make a record that we’d want to find ourselves when we’re digging in the crates,'” guitarist Dan Balis told Rolling Stone in 2012. “But we didn’t want it to just be some solipsistic exercise – we wanted to make something that was relevant for now.”