Nightbus (No 761)

Hometown: Hackney and LA. The lineup: Hannah Melbourn (vocals), Jackson Kennedy (keyboards), Laura Conway (drums), Ben Tarrant-Brown (vocals). The background: Melancholy and yearning come in many forms. Yesterday's new artist used the lightly embellished acoustic medium to convey his anxiety at the vagaries of love and life. Nightbus undertake a bolder project: to infiltrate ideas about infatuation and obsession into the club milieu. Of course, they are not the first to do this. Dance music has been dismissed as mere Music About Dancing since the 60s and 70s when really the best Motown and disco songs were actually more about heartache than hedonism. Pet Shop Boys understood this, as did New Order. And so did the French house bods. Did we say "infiltrate"? We meant in-filter-ate: Nightbus are latterday exponents of that form of 90s French house known as "filter disco". We still don't know why it was called filter disco, and we're none the wiser after consulting a specialist website that describes the genre's defining characteristics as "a heavy reliance on cut-off, filter, and phaser effects". We always assumed the music was named thus because of the way the happy-sad songs – by filter-disco champs such as Daft Punk, Cassius and Stardust – sounded as though everything had been filtered out except for the stuff that would make them sound great on the radio, then compressed for maximum effect, but hey, we're music fans, not scientists. We're big fans of Nightbus, three Londoners and one LA ex-pat who met on the 345 to Brixton on Boxing Day 2008. The story goes that they would meet up on said bus night after night. After boredom set in, they began singing a cappella versions of hits to pass the time. This went on for months, before they started recording self-penned tunes with a laptop over samples and drum beats. On the 345 bus. At night. To Brixton. We can only imagine what they made of it as they passed through Camberwell, although passengers who embarked at Peckham apparently strenuously urged them to pursue a more grime direction. But Nightbus would not be moved. Music sounds better, they decided, with filter disco. They were right an' all. I Wanna Be You, their debut single, wouldn't shame itself on a compilation beside Modjo's Lady or indeed Stardust's Music Sounds Better With You. It's got the euphoric rush of an Ibiza anthem, despite or because of the lyric concerning the insatiability of desire, and is one of the loveliest examples of popped-up trance we've heard since the United States of Electronica's It Is On! . They've also got a song called Freak All Week, and another called Kick the Party Out (Crash My Maserati) that finds the female singer this time doing the salivating. They're not quite as good as the single, but they do augur well for the future of Nightbus, and nocturnal travel in general. The buzz: "A trancey disco number that positions the band as a slightly odd but rather moreish post-Calvin Harris answer to Alphabeat." – PopJustice . The truth: One more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, etc. Most likely to: Get cabs from now on. Least likely to: Offer a better understanding of the term "filter disco". What to buy: I Wanna Be You is released by Island on 17 May. File next to: Stardust, Calvin Harris, United States of Electronica, Junior Senior. Links: myspace.com/nightbusmusic Tomorrow's new band: Smurfie Syco.