A lot of grown-up club kids have felt gratified—vindicated, even—watching vintage house music finding large crossover audiences thanks to the efforts of Disclosure, Jamie xx, and a small army of lesser-known producers doing their best to channel the sounds and energy of the Warehouse and Paradise Garage. While this wave of revivalists has been good about citing their sources and highlighting the original artists in their DJ sets, their actual music occasionally suffers from an overabundance of respect. House music was born out of a hacker mindset, and treating it with kid gloves, instead of finding a way to innovate on the old sounds, robs the music of one of its most vital elements.
Producer Matt Walker (aka Julio Bashmore) got his start in Bristol's dubstep scene, but he claims that his first exposure to dance music came through his older brother's vintage house records, and house seems to be his true calling. His breakout 2011 single "Battle for Middle You" combined classic house revivalism with a quintessentially Bristolian combination of sub bass frequencies and icy synths. The resulting track had all the feel of a long-lost Chicago treasure being rediscovered.
Since then, Walker's lost some of the Bristol chill, but kept his focus on house, to impressive results. His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening. Walker's a nonspecific revivalist who draws inspiration from every point on the genre's timeline—"Rhythm of Auld" emulates the kind of hard-edged disco funk that house was built on (including a spookily dead-on vocal part by J'Danna, who sings on three of the album's tracks), while "She Ain't" sounds like the funkily robotic stuff Cajmere was doing 20 years later with a dash of ghetto house raunch sprinkled on top.
He's not bound to any sort of outsized sense of responsibility to authenticity, though, and he freely adds his own personalized flourishes to the recipes he's working from. "She Ain't" ends in a glitchy breakdown that would've been very out of place in the mid-'90s. On some tracks he goes even further—a gently percolating bump combined with BIXBY's aching vocals peg "Let Me Be Your Weakness" as a stab at circa-1988 soulful house, but the rest of the arrangement is a fascinating mutant mashup of '80s freestyle and turn-of-the-millennium UK garage.
After "Battle for Middle You", Walker started collaborating with Jessie Ware, and some of her pop ambition seems to have rubbed off. It doesn't have anything as world-crushingly catchy as Disclosure's "Latch", but Knockin' Boots has enough pop hooks to interest people who don't normally listen to dance music outside the club. Much of the credit should go to the cast of vocal talent, which includes J'Danna, BIXBY, space-funk auteur Seven Davis Jr., star songwriter Sam Dew, and South African rapper Okmalumkoolkat (who helps to pull hip-house into pop's globally connected present on "Umuntu"), but Walker also has a talent for making tracks that can jack your body but also get stuck in your head.
Walker's already carved out a spot for himself on the worldwide pop scene with the Dew-fronted "Holding On", which has been on heavy rotation on Apple Music's Beats 1 Radio. House's danceability and deep utopian streak have helped it take root around the globe, spinning off more variations than even the most ambitiously imaginative house music fan could have pictured back in the days when Ron Hardy was spinning the smooth soul chopped up over thumping beats that "Holding On" tries—very successfully—to emulate. Now that house has conquered the world, it's feels right that a younger generation is bringing back the sounds of its earliest days for a victory lap, but it feels even better to know that there are artists like Walker involved who can keep pushing them into the future.
