What does "deep" mean? House music has been earnestly applying its wiki brainpower to this question for a couple of years now, processing decades of house and disco tropes and rendering an endless stream of variations upon the theme. Record after record aspires to the ideal type, with just the right balance of disco breaks, vintage-sounding drum machines, blocky piano chords, and suggestively yearning vocals. This goes for a lot of crappy records, but it also holds for some of the good ones, too. The debut album from Scotland's 6th Borough Project feels, in many ways, like a quintessentially of-the-moment dissertation on deepness; fortunately, it falls to the worthwhile end of the spectrum.
I don't think that 6th Borough Project-- the duo of house producers Graeme Clark, aka the Revenge, and Craig Smith-- would dispute their role as a certain kind of revivalist (or, better, caretaker, preservationist, gene-splicer). It's right there in the introduction to "Deep C", where a stoned-sounding voice intones, "Nothing is original. All human expression is really just endless variations. There are only a limited number of stories you can tell, but there's an unlimited number of ways to tell the same story."
Their story is a kind of idealized version of classic, disco-infused house, chock full of soul samples as super-saturated as old Polaroids. (I realize that we used up that metaphor on chillwave, but it does beg the question: Is house music's current retro fetish a manifestation of the same rearview-yearning currently running through indie music? Possibly.) They've definitely got a certain formula down: Tracks start off demurely, with a simple boom/clap drum pattern and a bass line, maybe a flickering loop of voice or guitar; then they swell about the middle, adding layers of keyboards and carefully daubing on more samples, like horn and voices. The climax often consists of a clipped phrase unrolling itself to its full length, a pocket in time before the groove kicks back in and the track disassembles itself, piece by piece. It's music made with a DJ's sense of sequencing, which is also a way of saying that it's largely about balance. And, make no mistake, it can be thrilling, especially when they slow down and linger on the contours of their source material, luxuriating in the wobble of a drum fill or the silvery arrow of a delay chain.
6th Borough Project and the Revenge are often counted as adherents to a slow-mo tendency in house music (along with Mark E, John Talabot, Nicolas Jaar and the Wolf + Lamb crew, and Prins Thomas and his Internasjonal label, among others), but not everything here is quite so downbeat. Perhaps half the tracks could fit into the second hour of any dance party-- or even the 11th, depending upon the club. "Find a Way" is a driving filter-disco number, all jangly guitar and throaty exhortation, that could crack the cinderblocks in a basement dive; the percussive "Iznae" is spacious but powerful, with bass and drums that thump your sternum, sampled snares leaning forward into the beat. (The album's least typical cut, it's also one of the best.) But "If the Feeling's Right" and "Deep C" both sink into wonderfully woozy territory, with blurry disco samples and synthesizers congealing around stumbling 4/4 kicks and handclaps. With its synths and vocoders, "Deep C" sounds like an experiment in new wave disco, maybe with a touch of Mike Oldfield's "In High Places"; "If the Feeling's Right" shuffles along the border between exhaustion and ecstasy, spurred on by keening vocal loops.
Back to nostalgia: the guys in 6th Borough Project know what they're doing. The name itself falls in line with classic house and disco monikers like Terrence Parker's Seven Grand Housing Authority and Began Cekic's Brooklyn Express; it gives off the same scent of sun-baked concrete and sweaty basements. It's not an original image of urban America, but then, nothing is original. 6th Borough Project repeat themselves sometimes, but they've got a solid grasp of the story they've chosen to tell. Somewhere, someone's writing a variation on one of their variations right now. The parts of this album where they depart from the script are enough to make me curious about how they'll respond.
