Even in a musical climate that prides itself on constant reinvention and change, Mi Ami's artistic trajectory has been fascinating. At the top of this decade, the bi-coastal noise outfit released their searing, energizing second album, Steal Your Face, a heady swirl of dubby textures and throat-shredding vocals that sounded like a future-shocked take on Public Image, Ltd.'s paranoid wobble. The record delivered on the promise of the previous year's debut, Watersports, suggesting that Mi Ami's sound was rapidly crystallizing. Then they splintered from the inside. Bassist Jacob Long left the band, and remaining members Damon Palermo and Daniel Martin-McCormick soldiered on with 2011's Dolphins, a surprising left-turn that laid Martin-McCormick's panicked, flailing vocals over thick, clubby production.
Mi Ami's turn towards the dancefloor was surprising, but if you knew where to look, Palermo and Martin-McCormick's side projects left clues. Martin-McCormick's Ital took a noisy, chaotic approach to house, with two full-lengths on Planet Mu and a smattering of releases on other labels that ran the gamut from abusive, noisy body music to purple, psychedelic swarm; meanwhile, Palermo took a less circuitous path to club music as Magic Touch.
His sole release from 2013, the solid Nothing More EP, carried a pristine sheen that sounded as if someone had taken a vacuum to the fuzzy detritus that surrounded his previous constructions for 100% Silk. Palermo's debut LP for the label, Palermo House Gang, still has plenty of dusty grit—one of the most endearing qualities of 100% Silk's output is how their releases sound as if you're hearing the music pumping out of speakers through thin walls in an adjacent room—but in its best moments, the melodies are sharp and bright, inching toward high-definition house.
Over the past few years, 100% Silk has overcome skepticism that their roster was mostly indie kids in dance music dress-up, and the imprint is now one of the most consistently interesting underground dance labels in North America. Even when considering the increased reliability of the label's catalog, though, Palermo House Gang is impressively robust, reverently embracing disco's sparkle and classic house music's sassy thump. The swaying saxophone of "It's Love" and "Calabria"'s tropical humidity are not unlike something Frankie Knuckles would throw into one of his sets, while the synth bleats that open album highlight "You" provide a tricky nod to Alice Deejay's trance classic "Better Off Alone" before unfolding into the type of skipping, chopped-vocal body-mover evocative of New Jersey garage legend Todd Edwards.
In addition to referencing house music, the title Palermo House Gang suggests that, keeping with Not Not Fun and 100% Silk's communal origins, this is a group effort. And the album is in fact heavy on collaboration. Notably, Brooklyn’s Octo Octa has his hand in Palermo House Gang's two most notable highlights: "You", which also features contributions from Body High-affiliated duo Newbody, and the 13-minute "House of Intuition", which accentuates dense drone and hypnotic hand-drum patterns with a cyclical, sharp synth line that opens up beautifully in the track's final minutes.
At its best, Palermo House Gang is pure dance music candy, smacking of familiar sounds done properly and with a little bit of roughness around the edges. Accordingly, the record's minor structural hiccups—an unnecessary second mix of "It's Love", the thin vocals laid atop opener "I Need the Magic", a general lack of cohesion—suggest Palermo's best work is yet to come. His most well-known project has been marked by its perpetual change, but Palermo seems to have found sonic stability on his own.
