Frank & Tony is a collaboration between two Brooklyn-based dance music veterans, Francis Harris and Anthony Collins. If the name brings to mind one of those innumerable East Coast production duos who vacillated between house and R&B in the early '90s, that’s probably not an accident: Harris and Collins have, over the course of several EPs, pursued the contemplative and melancholic deep house sound developed in New York and New Jersey. It’s the type of music that inevitably gets described as "sumptuous"; a sound that, with its relaxed tempos and smoky hues, has proven itself equally at home on dance floors and in living rooms.
Harris and Collins both have long histories churning out high energy singles for DJs, but it’s Harris whose solo work has recently taken a turn toward outre composition and lush textures. This year’s well-received Minutes of Sleep was an experiment almost completely untethered from the dance floor, an album whose exceptional clarity allowed Harris and listeners to swim amongst its rich detail. It’s easy to see Harris’ hand in You Go Girl, Frank & Tony’s first album, an album that is far more concerned with the sound of house music than its function.
Though the album’s sound is indebted to those deep house classics, it doesn’t share their cultural impact. Those records, crucial in helping carve out spaces for gay and transgender communities, had a socio-political purpose that You Go Girl can’t; instead, the record plays as an exquisite display of deep house’s sound palette, a record on which every sound and gesture is imbued with elegance and purpose.
There’s a moment in the middle of "Call Me Rain" that will be familiar to anyone who’s listened to house music before: a heavy, trudging bass drum is reintroduced after a short passage of heavily-effected electric piano. A few bars latter, a tittering hi-hat and then a clap on the second and fourth beat, splashing down like a boot into a puddle. There is no novelty here; every one of these elements is commonplace, including the structure of the track. What feels unique about Frank & Tony, however, is that these elements aren’t aligned like this to aid a DJ in mixing a track, but rather because this is the ideal presentation for better appreciating these sounds: the cavity the kick drum carves out each time it booms, the crisp landing of the clap, the glittering tinsel of the hi-hats.
You Go Girl is an appreciation and a study of sound. The sounds it wants to study happen to be best observed in a 120 bpm deep house track. It’s in this way that Harris and Collins owe a debt to artists like Matthew Herbert and Terre Thaemlitz (especially her work as DJ Sprinkles), artists with avant-garde roots who have often chosen to contrast their more experimental and sound design impulses with the conventions of house music. (Indeed, the duo collaborated with Thaemlitz for a track on one of three 12''s that accompanies the release of You Go Girl.)
You Go Girl offers a similar richness of detail, its slack tempos gently guiding listeners. They mostly stick to the script: brisk drum, hazy keyboards, a nod-able bassline. Tracks such as "After Days" and "Faded (Dub)" construct noir-ish atmospheres, imagining a world in which grim detectives nod along on dusky dancefloors. A handful of vocal collaborations—a moody and sour Gry Bagøien on "Bring the Sun", a cryptic Jason Poranski on "Resistance"—offer crucial variety.
You Go Girl is a conservative album in every way, asking very little of listeners: if you choose not to stare at the macro details of a bass drum, You Go Girl will fade pleasantly into the background. It doesn’t have the scope or ambition of Thaemlitz’s monumental Midtown 120 Blues, a clear influence. Its instincts are construction, not destruction. The album at times seems like a coloring book in which someone has exclusively drawn inside the lines, but with extreme precision. There’s value in that: these are pretty pictures with a lot of detail, and the care and attention with which they were produced shouldn’t be confused for a lack of passion.
