Harmonie Park Revisited

It's no surprise how easily the 13 tracks on Harmonie Park Revisited, recorded between the mid-'90s and late '00s, hang together. Deep house, after all, is as formalist a style as dance music is: jazzy keyboard motifs, synth-string sustains, funk-fueled kick drums, hi-hat programming, and burbling bass distilled into a perfectly concave system that evaporates distinctions between eras. That might sound like a recipe for tedium, and in less imaginative hands, it certainly can be. But Oak Park, MI's Rick Wade has ideas to spare. He's dabbled in ghetto-tech via the Bass Force label (for which he recorded as Big Daddy Rick), but the Harmonie Park label is where Wade is at his most fertile. Only one track on Harmonie Park Revisited features a non-sampled vocalist ("Crazy Luv," with guest star Eva Soul), but these coiled, slinky, deceptively simple grooves don't need singers to carve out their own distinct identities. "Angry Pimp" (originally released in 1997) and "Pimp Factor" (1999) merge big, insistent, playful beats with dizzy, elastic, electric keyboard lines. "Fade Away" (1998) crisscrosses strings that could have been taken from a lesser-known Chic production over a rhythm track with an incredible amount of give to it. While Wade clearly looks to the clean productions of the '70s as a signpost, he also utilizes subtle filtering to give his work a dirt-on-the-lens feel that just makes it seem all the more timeless. This is one of the finest house albums ever assembled.