On the insert for their 2013 cassette Life in the Zone, Vancouver’s Pender Street Steppers thank their MPCs, all the star signs, even “everyone that never supported us.” For good measure, they added that they were cool with it if you decided to dub the cassette and give it away to your friends. Part of the city’s media-averse Mood Hut collective, the duo of Jack Jutson and Liam Butler come across as fairly chill individuals in words and sounds. The duo has since leisurely released three singles, most of them choice selections from that original mixtape. With this new five song EP, Pender Street Steppers nearly double their available tracks.
With little of the Mood Hut catalog available digitally, the label’s sound is a slippery one to pin down. There are traces of boogie and funk to be had, but dub, smooth jazz, and new age also blip up. Though the beats hew closest to house music, they are by turns breezy and hazy, and you may find yourself zoning out to them rather than moving. The crew often toys with expectations, as when they released a compilation of dance edits entitled Disco Mantras: mellow and woozy, they drew from unlikely sources like new age reedman Paul Horn. Listening through the Mood Hut catalog, you’re not quite sure if they are ideally suited for bobbing on a dancefloor or else strolling across the quad, and “Raining Again” strikes that balance.
Despite the inherent dejection in its name, “Raining Again” is perky, full of the crisp hi-hats and dubbed-out toms that give their productions a heady feel. The melody is carried by what might be an electric saxophone from a 1980s infomercial, its cheesy, cheap tone closer to a duck quack. But whereas previous PSS productions would have just ridden that sound around and around, now Jutson and Butler deftly fold in more elements. Clean-picked guitar lines enter against a fluttering arpeggio (and upon repeated playback, a voice humming along in harmony). Soon another sax line swoops in, sending the track even higher into the rain clouds.
For Mood Hut obsessives, the most notable track here is “Molto Bene,” which was pivotal when the duo first slotted it into their Resident Advisor mix back in 2015. Built around a shuffling snare and kick pattern with fidgety bass and organ keys that flutter around the beat, it’s the kind of track the duo excels in, catchy yet still fuzzy. A voice mutters in the background and a jaunty whistle winds through.
As good as the duo can be at taking a nagging little sound and looping it to the point of mesmerism (think back to the “um” sound that runs through their track “Bubble World,” or the hiccup of “Openin’ Up”), the back half of this EP finds them retreading a few tropes. “Blackboard” utilizes a grimaced “aye!” as its vocal, which becomes redundant and needling, taking away from its playfully ponging drums. “No Need”’s clap and snare veer so close to Jack J’s own “Looking Forward to You” that you half-expect the song to stumble into it. The half-mumbled vocal delivery that Jutson also deployed on his own single reappears here, this time murmuring “baby don’t stop.” But rather than come across as a dance music command, it’s so laid-back as to be inert, the keys around incrementally slowing and spacing out around the vocal. It makes for a relaxed closer, but the EP finds the Steppers not venturing very far outside of their comfort zone.
