Album Review: Recloose - Hiatus On The Horizon (Artist)

Writer: Andy Newcombe

Recloose’s new album Hiatus On The Horizon has be long awaited, following the buzz created by CD-R copies of the track Dust, which went into Gilles Petersons’s Worldwide Winners for 2004, and gained support from DJs as a far apart, musically, as Laurent Garnier and Mr Scruff.

For those not familiar with Recloose, he originally hails from Detroit and was first signed to Carl Craig’s Planet E imprint, with early releases including the fantastic Spelunking EP with the sublime cut, Get There Tonight (an essential piece of Recloose listening!). Since then his productions have been released on Studio! K7, Rushour Recordings, Playhouse and now, Peacefrog. He has collaborated on projects with Ayro, Dwele, and the Innerzone Orchestra, and remixed the likes of Jazzanova, Herbert and Sun Ra. He put out the excellent mix CD, Jigsaw Music, on Eskimo Recordings that travels through the future jazz, broken beat and quirky house scenes, displaying his skill as a selector and DJ. Now, Recloose resides on the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand, where he completed his second full-length album.

So, what does this new instalment of Recloose hold? The album opens up with Landed, a track that uses vocal samples around a bassline to build this into a great groove, complimented by the lush vocals of Genevieve Marentette. This is followed up by Still Beyond Me, which doesn’t do too much for me, sounds a little too early '90s Acid Jazz for my liking. Everything is rectified though as the magic of Dust is unleashed, with Joe Dukie’s (of Fat Freddy’s Drop fame) vocal sitting proudly on the sax and key riffs. It’ll be very hard to tire of this track. We then take another early '90s Acid Jazz diversion with Spinnin Out, but things are brought back on track again with Mana’s Bounce (the second single from the album, due out on a limited edition 7”), which is some skankin ska bizness that’ll take you to a beautiful beach somewhere, with a cold Red Stripe in hand, to aid in some serious head nodding.

The second half of the album takes off at a pace with the very funky instrumental work out that is Turkish Delight, but before things are allowed to pick up too much of a pace we slow down into The Game Goes On with Hollie Smith’s smoky voice. We then head into some free jazz style broken beat territory with Makutu Man and then Joe Dukie returns to show us his guitar and vocal skllls on Time Is On Your Side, a new direction for Recloose, with a kind of folk, soul feel that rolls along nicely. Things come to a close with the fantastic Why I Otta, which is sure to be a highlight of Recloose’s live performances. This has a great latin flavoured bass line surrounded by swirling vocals and great live drumming from Riki Gooch. All members of the line up add their own take on the melody from the horn section to melodica, before we are left crying, “encore!”

RELATED LINKS:



Buy Hiatus On The Horizon at Amazon UK (CD) / US(CD)




PUBLISHED: 22 August 2005

RELEASE DATE: 1 August 2005 (UK) / 23 August 2005 (US) .

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