You may have picked up on NYC house label Basement Floor over the past eight years, but you could have just as easily missed its low-key manoeuvres through the undergrowth. A hotly tipped first release from Elbee Bad and Line Cook set the tone back in 2013, while subsequent drops from Steve Murphy, Tim Schumacher and others have nodded to a grubby strain of hardware club tackle with small basement spots in mind. That’s the tone that emergent talent Sweater On Polo strikes on this, his second solo EP after an impressive drop on Fixed Rhythms and an appearance on Acemo and MoMA READY’s HAUS of ALTR label.
Based in New York and carving out a promising path for himself, Sweater On Polo deals in jack tracks with hand-wrought flair and plenty of attitude. It chimes with the lo-fi legacy of labels like L.I.E.S, but sports a bit more snap and punch, harking back to the immediacy of Chicago rather than getting waylaid by noise and distortion. ‘Backroom Deals’ may be swimming in heavy flange, but the bass is on point. ‘Chicken Head’ is all twitchy drum machine fits and madcap vocal blurts with a Gherkin Jerks verve. ‘1 U I O’ closes the record out with muffled dreaminess lurking behind the steady tick of the drums, but again there’s a strange kind of clarity to offset the intimate oddness of the sound, marking Sweater On Polo out as a class act within the realm of box jamming house music.
| A1 | Backroom Deals |
| A2 | Chicken Head |
| B1 | The Hunchback |
| B2 | 1 U I O |
