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Records I Am Glad to Have Found in 2023: Part 1

Instead of rufflin' whatever (feather) maybe it's better that there's just a place where I can tell you that my life is better for having found these records and having them within reach. Maybe you might wanna reach for them as well. Up to you! Maybe feel fortunate that I want to engage with Tumblr at all, but the 16 or so accounts who said (anonymously) that they miss my review content may get a kick out of all this, and see where my head's at now.

New records, not-new records, things I bought, things that were sent to me, things I bartered for. Fair play.

First up, this Beau Wanzer record that I wrote up a while back. I feel exactly the same about it. It's new as of January and there aren't many releases out there like it at the moment. Undead, shufflin' Beau hours. One of my favorite DJs and electronic musicians in Chicago, he really does not seem to walk any path other than his own.

BEAU WANZER - GRUMPS Excellent new collection from what seems to be a bottomless bucket of bones by Chicago's Beau Wanzer, with nothing her

Al B. Sure! - In Effect Mode LP (Uptown/Warner Bros., 1988)

Growing up in my early teens, two songs from Al B. Sure!'s debut album were more or less inescapable: the masterful slow jam "Nite and Day," and the more uptempo quasi-diss track "Off On Your Own (Girl)." I never owned the record (why would I, this always seemed like a "why buy the cow" situation), and it never seemed to turn up used, something I better understand now.

This thing is great! It's short, mindful of our time and Al's. Side 1 contains four slow jams (the Nite! side), kicking off with the classic "Nite and Day" (so much rooftop glare and World Trade Center fixation in the vid) and cascading down into the whisper/falsetto/snap percussion ballad "Oooh This Love Is So" (kinda like an older brother NKOTB slow jam, really well arranged, FM synths cresting over top with some tasteful guitar buried underneath). His take on Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" is doctor's office soft, but works where the Fugees' take doesn't, as Al seems to know there's no improving on the original, and he's lucky just to put it in his framework. "Naturally Mine" is like the shadowy flipside to the majesty of the opener, and doesn't come close, but also doesn't need to; the Teddy Riley guitar work does a lot on its own.

Side 2 (the Day! side) turns on the lights for some more uptempo New Jack Swing template jams. Opener "Rescue Me" sounds like two songs that were somehow merged into one, but that may just be the tonal difference between the intro and verse structure.

"Off On Your Own (Girl)" is neatly, nearly perfect, with quiet, pressurized syncopation, Al's bellyache storytellin' (sits by the phone a lot, it seems), and a delivery, particularly in the chorus, which says so much more than the title states. I'm particularly enamored of his switching between judgmental sing-speak/orchestra hit stress and his bracing falsetto. On the stremf! He even throws us a Slick Rick impression in a bridge. Last two tracks seem interchangeable but that's fine; you don't serve surf after the turf, even if you're coming in hot with bass pounds.

Uptown is generally a welcome sign of quality for this time and place; from Al to Heavy D., Guy to Jodeci. Andre knew what was up. Cool cat logo too.

Honestly there are probably other Al jams worth seeking out, and of course his performance in New Jack City when he fingers Ice-T as a narc with those Bert eyebrows of his. Most people don't hit this sort of success right out of the gate, and that's the needle he threads so effortlessly here.

Ron Morelli – Heart Stopper 2xLP (L.I.E.S., 2023)

Ron was one of the first people I met when I moved to NYC in 2000, and for a while I was regularly having lunch with him, Steve Roche, Adam Paterson, and Matt Smith at the Uptown Juice Bar in lower Manhattan, when we were all working in some sort of office and/or dot-com capacity, going to ABC No Rio and the like. I'd fall in and out of that orbit for a while over the next 6-7 years, as bands formed and broke up, people worked up their DJ chops, etc. At some point Ron moved down to Philly and was grinding in a more formal club DJ capacity before coming back to NYC and starting L.I.E.S., living in the trap, and working at A-1 in the East Village. It wasn't easy, even in that orbit, to find the L.I.E.S. releases, but the quality was always there.

I fell off a bit due to life and the like, missed a lot of Ron's Hospital output (as well as a lot of later L.I.E.S., again due to life stuff; the last one I gripped from the initial run was Florian Kupfer's Lifetrax), and last I knew he had relocated to Paris. Living in Chicago has given me more of an opportunity to interface with house music as it happened, with proximity to the records and DJs in clubs, to where it started to click with me. Heart Stopper retains this same sort of focus, drilling down on the repetition and stress/release of the foundational cuts of the initial era. My fave here is "Tangled Trap of Love," a big nod to Master C & J's "Face It," but I've found myself putting this record on and letting it roll to the close more often than most I've favored this year. Didn't make it to the Podlasie Club back in May, but I did appreciate this (paywalled) interview in the First Floor Substack, the guy I remember so well playing stoically to the bozos up front, dialing down style to the horizon where it meets substance and accepting nothing less.

(Doug Mosurock)