Album Review: Sonny Fodera / ‘Moving Forward’ (Cajual)

Sonny Fodera - Moving Forward

★★★★☆

The Australian makes club music to buy expensive cocktails to: clean and classy funky house, a fluttery bed of niceness stepping off basslines encouraging a throb from hip-bone to big toe. A builder rather than a definer, Fodera aims at the early part of your social when you’re just getting a feel for where your night’s gonna take you.

A little French filter makes “Turn Down” featuring Gene Farris the one to drain your glass to, and the album’s palm trees are hit by gusts when the clonking basslines of “How Quick,” entailing a great lesson in attitude from Amber Jolene, and “Putting It Down” turn the album with low-end house sureshots that swap that last Cosmopolitan for a slug of something stronger. Your cosy terrace view now doubling as a locked-out sweatbox, the VIP experience becomes a back and forth between the cool (though you may feel pestered by “Caviar Dreams” trying to get to know you) and the steaming.

Fodera’s application of just a little bit of pressure spreads into the sexy pre-Millennium garage-like wind of “Make Me Feel,” and Kim Swift applies dollops of sass on the frosted “You Ain’t For Real.” In effect quite a modestly constructed (or safely functioning) record shaped by in-tune lyricists (never better illustrated than the impudent tribalism of “Mo Fish in da Sea”), Fodera is definitely one for targeting vibes so that the rest shall follow.

File under: DJ Mes, Bru Fave, Oscar G