THE GENRE PROJECT - January 12 - Deep House

Genre of the Day - Deep House

Album of the Day - 2012-2017 by Against All Logic (2018)

Today’s genre is our first foray into house music on this project, which is quite exciting. My sister is a massive fan of house music, and so am I even if I don’t think I’ve gotten quite as deep or as far into house music as she has. House music has such a beautiful, special place in American music history to me: ironically, RateYourMusic reviews held a poignant description of the genre, with user m_crowley calling it ‘folk music of the dispossessed, pushed aside’ on a review of today’s album. House music emerged out of Black queer circles in the late 1970s in Chicago and Detroit with DJs tinkering with disco beats to make them more electronic and mechanical-sounding; from there, its easy fusion with pop music via high-profile remixes and its unbeatable qualities for the dancefloor took it to world-renowned status and influence.

Deep house, then, emerged as a variant of house, focusing more on a ‘darker’, moodier sound and jazzier and funkier undertones. I can’t say I have had much exposure or understanding of what makes deep house deep, but its sonic qualities certainly make up for any lack of understanding of its moniker. I think house music is so masterful and resonant because of the way it mixes the light, energetic, optimistic quality of dance music with moody undertones; it’s a beautiful mix of the levity we often aspire to feel when listening to music with the more redemptive, freeing ideals of dance music. 

It’s so strange to me that in the last two days both of the #1 RYM music album within these genres weren’t available of Spotify and only on YouTube so I did the #2 album. Is there some unconscious bias manifesting here, like that an album only being available on YouTube makes it seem inherently better? Or is it not reverse causality and the music that’s solely available on YouTube is inherently better? This is now a question of its own that’s now on my mind, but doesn’t really add anything to the genre conversation at hand.

Anyway, today’s album is actually the most recent in my journey so far, coming out in 2018. Despite this, I loved the way this album draws on deeper soul vocal samples at times while not exclusively relying on them. To use them as punctuation and exclamation between longer bits of solely instrumental house created a super nice sonic flow on this album. Pitchfork described this album as blissful which I partly agree with (even though I feel like today’s DJ, Nikolas Jaar under the side project Against All Logic, plays with a variety of moods throughout), but I liked how throughout there was also darker, gritter soundscapes and percussion incorporated. This album was excellent, and I know I’ll definitely be revisiting it frequently. I saved the tracks I Never Dream, Some Kind of Game, and Such a Bad Way, but the album merits a listening all the way through.