2016 repress - What does "deep" mean? House music has been earnestly applying its wiki brainpower to this question for a couple of years now, processing decades of house and disco tropes and rendering an endless stream of variations upon the theme. Record after record aspires to the ideal type, with just the right balance of disco breaks, vintage-sounding drum machines, blocky piano chords, and suggestively yearning vocals. This goes for a lot of crappy records, but it also holds for some of the good ones, too. The debut album from Scotland's 6th Borough Project feels, in many ways, like a quintessentially of-the-moment dissertation on deepness, and it definitely falls in the worthwhile end of the spectrum.
6th Borough Project and the Revenge are often counted as adherents to a slow-mo tendency in house music (along with Mark E, John Talabot, Nicolas Jaar and the Wolf + Lamb crew, and Prins Thomas and his Internasjonal label, among others), but not everything here is quite so downbeat. Perhaps half the tracks could fit into the second hour of any dance party-- or even the 11th, depending upon the club. "Find a Way" is a driving filter-disco number, all jangly guitar and throaty exhortation, that could crack the cinderblocks in a basement dive; the percussive "Iznae" is spacious but powerful, with bass and drums that thump your sternum, sampled snares leaning forward into the beat. But "If the Feeling's Right" and "Deep C" both sink into wonderfully woozy territory, with blurry disco samples and synthesizers congealing around stumbling 4/4 kicks and handclaps. With its synths and vocoders, "Deep C" sounds like an experiment in new wave disco, maybe with a touch of Mike Oldfield's "In High Places"; "If the Feeling's Right" shuffles along the border between exhaustion and ecstasy, spurred on by keening vocal loops.
| A1 | Find A Way |
| A2 | Iznae |
| B1 | If The Feeling's Right |
| B2 | Changin |
| C1 | B.U.R.T. (The Journey) |
| C2 | Back To Me |
| D1 | Deep C |
| D2 | Settle |
| E1 | The Fool |
| E2 | B.U.R.T. (Inside) |
| F1 | Endless Nights |
| F2 | Let Yourself Go (Live Mix) |
| F3 | String-A-Lude |
