Daniel Martin-McCormick may be thinking that 2012 is the year he breaks through. It's taken him a decade to get here, from the scruffy post-punk of Black Eyes, a dancier advance on that template with Mi Ami, plus his various solo projects (Sex Worker, Ital). The latter earned particular notice for the helix-shaped house rhythms riddled throughout this year's Hive Mind, gaining Martin-McCormick a Village Voice cover feature. On Decade he returns to work with Damon Palermo as half of Mi Ami, a record released by Not Not Fun offshoot 100% Silk, who helped establish Ital through a series of 12" singles in 2011. It's an apt way of tethering Martin-McCormick's dual careers, of drawing an easy line between them, especially when the expansive deep house influence at the heart of Decade kicks in.
Michaelangelo Matos notes the surprising cachet Ital has earned in the dance world in that Voice feature, with Martin-McCormick chiming in on how indie-oriented artists releasing electronic side projects don't usually have "any weight in that world." Ital's curveball-laden approach mostly attracts an indie crowd dabbling in dance music, while simultaneously having a gentle nibble at the margins of the tightly cloistered house scene. But in the unlikely (yet tantalizing and potentially audience-expanding) event that Ital ends up going full-on four-to-the-floor, Martin-McCormick still has Mi Ami as an exit-hatch, a fall-back in which he can further impale himself on the serrated edges that have marked his career to date.
Decade follows a similar template to last year's Dolphins, containing four tracks of increased breadth and depth. This is an advance on that record, just as most new Mi Ami recordings have been on their predecessors, with the duo allowing the screech and howl of prior albums to taper off into short, staccato bursts of aggression. There's nothing as flat-out grating as "Secrets" from Steal Your Face here, nor is there anything like the Damo Suzuki-channeling "Peacetalks/Downer" from Watersports. Instead, this is all tension, no release, all build, no freefall. There are numerous points of intersection with Ital and Palermo's solo project, Magic Touch. "Horns", for example, plays out like a subdued take on Palermo's "Clubhouse", with the jittery female vocal samples stripped out and replaced with Martin-McCormick's sinewy bawl.
If past Mi Ami releases felt like a band's hunting for a place where its influences could line up just so, Decade is the sound of gaining clarity as far as what it might do with them. It helps that Martin-McCormick's stringy vocals don't dominate. The poised groove of the instrumental (save for a few warped vocal samples) "Time of Love" would scarcely be able to carry his weight, while the standout "Bells" backs him into a corner, limiting him to subtle, well-timed outbursts that don't drench the track in the kind of tortured sadness and anger of prior Mi Ami records. Instead, Decade finds a different kind of weight, the kind trailing in the moody undertow of Mr. Fingers' classic acid cut "Beyond the Clouds", or in 808 State's Hacienda anthem, "Pacific State". Like Hive Mind, Decade manages to be both lean and meticulous without homing in on a clear point of convergence, feeling very much like a vision still undergoing a slo-mo blur into focus.
