Dance Your Head Off With Moon King’s “Ordinary Lover Ft. Natty G” Premiere – AdHoc

Dance Your Head Off With Moon King’s “Ordinary Lover Ft. Natty G” Premiere

Sometimes, the ordinary can be infectious. On “Ordinary Lover Ft. Natty G,” the sparkling bonus track off Moon King‘s latest tape for Arbutus, standard kicks, punchy bass, and a earworming piano melody play out along a familiar house thump. In the hands of a less capable producer, such an assemblage could run derivative or fall flat, but under Daniel Benjamin’s delicate direction, each element whirs into place and delivers an intoxicatingly coordinated performance. Accompanying the addictive pulse of the track is a video that also succeeds in summoning a satisfying simplicity.

Much like the song itself, whose ordinary components come from a stock milieu but—when locked into the groove—enliven and thrum in ecstasy, the video for “Ordinary Lover Ft. Natty G” is situated in a blank, unremarkable room. But what sticks is what populates the room: bodies in motion, perfectly attuned yet letting loose to the banger that galvanizes their movement. Shots of sweat and silk, tattoos and tanktops twirl across the visual register under a layer of VHS fuzz. Far from muffling or obscuring the dynamic magnetism of the beat and the dancing, the coating of chintz captures the hazy trace, the blur of motion in itself. It’s precisely this motility, this singular capacity to stimulate movement, that textures the corporeal sonics of “Ordinary Lover Ft. Natty G.”

In a song ostensibly about the desire for an extraordinary lover, Benjamin and Natty G suffuse the track with a sensuous desire to move, to dance. In the very articulation of his desire, Benjamin has crafted a genuinely seductive song—and awakened the listener’s desire, too. As the track plonks along, music becomes more than just an expression, a communicatory pathway: it becomes somatic. It becomes satisfaction. When Natty G sings that she’s “tired of all the cream without the cherry,” it’s hard not to think of the track itself, a bonus track, after all, as a cherry on top, a visceral delight that gets stuck in your gums well after it putters out. What’s the best way to work off a sundae, anyway? Dance it off.

Check out Benjamin’s newest tape Hamtramck ’16 out now, and make sure to dance with Moon King when he performs September 8 at The Silent Barn with Dougie Poole.

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