★★★★☆
Silky smooth house. Purity. NYC and Chicago blooms in its family tree. Gianni Siravo’s prose expresses a love for deep, beefy beats that have probably never heard of EDM. This is a declaration of war on all dancefloor suckers with a hot-stepping sequence of time honored hustles.
Of filtered stabs, uptown swing and on “Superstring” and “Sneaker Girlz,” piano melodies that can in no way ever be retired, the engineering of a to-the-break-of-dawn vibe barely yields so much as a clearing of a vocalist’s throat – raw poetry indeed. Siravo’s playbook is full of foolproof strategies: check the metallic bump of “Siren Chords”, “Distant Planet” as a little dubbier and techier, the coloured skies of ambient forecaster “Belts of Orion”, and the Robin S bass of “Celestial Spheres.” Presumably when hitting the DJ booth Washerman brings both headphones and a clipboard.
A record solely concerned with restoring traditional values forces imagination and innovation into a weirdly negative playing of second fiddle (though perhaps in part to a self-imposed containment of equipment and technology). It sounds ‘right,’ yet the clubbing becomes hard to describe in terms other than dutiful. The reality is an album that rarely lets you down. Fluid to the max, Washerman has the stamina to go on and on, meaning if you’re buying out the bar or have new dancing shoes you wanna show off to everyone, he’s with you every step of the way.
File under: Boo Williams, Apollonia, Dexter, M@W