Mike Dunn has been making house music for about as long as the style has existed. The Chicago native started producing in the early 1980s and came up DJing at house parties, where he’d flesh out his sets with drum machines and reel-to-reel tapes. The driving nature of early anthems like 1987’s “Dance You Mutha” comes, in part, from his improvising tunes in clubs, then going home and recreating more polished versions in his studio. Never too polished, though: Mike Dunn classics like “Dance You Mutha” and “Magic Feet” are prized for their raw, urgent feel, with unvarnished drum machines wreathed in gnarly acid basslines and his signature crowd-stoking vocals.
Dunn never stopped working. In the 2000s, he produced R&B singers like Syleena Johnson, and a deal with Diddy’s Bad Boy label had him making rap tracks like True Enuff’s “On My Momma.” Lately, alongside fellow Chicago veteran Terry Hunter, he’s been turning out sumptuous soulful house under the name House N’HD; his recent solo work is in the swinging, percussive style known as Afro house. But his glory days were the late ’80s and early 1990s, so it makes sense that he returns to those sounds on My House From All Angles. His first solo full-length in 27 years is essentially a celebration of the old school: Acid lines squirm, vintage drum machines (or their contemporary plug-in equivalents) knock and thrash, and throughout it all, Dunn holds court with his commanding baritone, alternately glowering and effervescent.
On the one hand, it’s an auspicious moment for musicians like Dunn who have been at it for decades: The raw machine sounds of ’80s and ’90s house are as hot as they’ve ever been, and there’s a hunger for fresh material that sounds old. (Much of Dunn’s most visible output of the past few years has entailed dusting off old tapes and collaborating with newer artists on explicitly retro-flavored songs; one of those, Jax Jones’ “House Work,” featuring Dunn and MNEK, has racked up 11 million YouTube streams in the past year and a half.) The risk veterans face is that there’s little incentive to push themselves past the sounds that first defined them. That’s the downfall of My House From All Angles: It’s full of capable floor-fillers, but it rarely offers listeners much they haven’t heard many times before.
My House is best when it aims for classic, rather than expressly retro. “Have It for You Babe” sounds like the kind of loopy disco-house cut that sent Daft Punk down their own filter-happy rabbit holes; “Modulation” is a slowly building acid cut with cavernous synth stabs reminiscent of big-room New York house. On “DJ Beat That Shhh,” the album’s highlight, luminous pads underscore Dunn’s most playful vocal performance, where his gravelly interjections function as pure texture. For the most part, My House sticks to the hip-house wheelhouse. There are chilly acid tracks overlaid with heavy-breathing vocals more spoken than sung: invocations of “that acid rush,” commands to “move it,” rapturous tributes to “that body music/That keeps you in a trance.” Too many of these tracks fall flat. The beats, basslines, and vocals all suffer from over-familiarity. It doesn’t help that two different songs rhyme “soul” with “lose control.” You get the sense that the well is running dry here.
Early in “DJ Beat That Shhh,” Dunn purrs, “Let’s take it back to the ’90s.” Ironically, it’s one of the few tracks on the album that doesn’t sound like his ’90s recordings. Its bright keys and vivacious vocal style are more in keeping with “This Here Is House Muzik” and “Na Na Na Na (I Walks With God),” a pair of bubbly songs Dunn put out in 2008. Where his early tunes are gritty as a basement’s concrete floor, those two are crystalline and soaring, and his voice bounces and skips in the same way that it does on “DJ Beat That Shhh,” like a perpetual-motion machine driven by chuckles. Like them, “DJ Beat That Shhh” offers the tantalizing suggestion that the real secret to house veterans’ longevity might not lie in reliving old glories after all.
