So many tunes, so little time 4

Okay just quickly then, before the first full week of 2012 gets underway, here's the 'best of the rest' from the past couple of weeks…

Montana & Stewart – Love Is The Key
One for those who like their house music ultra-soulful and laidback to the max, this features an impressive line-up of the scene's big players: Kafele, Mark De Clive-Lowe, Richard Earnshaw and Clemens Rumpf, with a sweet vocal from Eliki
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Ohm Hourani & Dany Fares – Imperial My Ass
Tough tech-house from Montreal's Casbour Records that leans heavily towards the techno end of the spectrum. Bonus cut Four O Two offers a slightly housier ride, albeit still with those rollin', poundin' techno 4/4s dominating.
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Vlada Asanin – De Tapas
More tough techno/tech-house here… but this time with a split vocal consisting of, on the one hand, one of those ominous, distorted techno voices and, on the other, a chef giving you some advice on cooking “traditional Spanish tapas”. Oddly.
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Pao C – Full Moon
The original here is a pleasant enough slice of deep, proggy tech-house with Balearic overtones. You then get NINE remixes to play with, covering various bases… Simon Firth's would be my first port of call.
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Steve Ward – Footprints To A Forgotten World EP
Three tracks, five mixes in total, flirting with deep, ambient, prog and tech flavours. The Marcus Fix Remix of Chartreuse Verte does it best for me. Oh yeah… and for every download sold, they'll plant a tree in Melbourne. Which is nice.
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Hapkido & Nais – West Of The Border EP
Tuff, driving house (not tech-house) music that doesn't take itself over seriously, but gets on with the business of moving booties on the dancefloor. Of the three tracks, the sax-dripping Boy would be my pick.
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Philly Soundsystem – Amenology EP
Three tracks of hi-octane but not stoopid-gnarly D&B, of which Stronger is the cut most likely to bring a nostalgic smile to the faces of the veteran ravers.
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Omid 16b presents – 3 Days, 4 Nights
Omid Nazourideh presents a V/A ep on his own Sex On Wax imprint, featuring Mark Holmes, Dabilla, Jay Storic and of course Omid himself. Tough house for bigger rooms is the general order of the day, with Holmes' Coming Home the standout for me.
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Various – Restyled Vol 4
Trendy Mullet have had lots of props on here in recent months… here they come good once again with an EP featuring new mixes of some of their back cat gems. It's all good, as they say, but T Ruggieri's mix of the Inland Knights' Control is particularly worthy of your attention.
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As ever, apologies to the artists/labels in question that these have had to be very short n' sweet reviews, but there's only so many hours in the day.

Various - Elevation's First 50 Re:Tooled & Re:Funked

Oops, no updates all week? Sorry, didn't realise it had been quite that long but I've been stoopid busy…

Anyway, here's one I should have blogged about a couple of weeks back, but it's just too damned good to let it slide by unraved about. Cos this is about as good a house comp as you're gonna find right now, basically!

Celebrating the landmark first 50 releases from Irish stable, the album features some 21 tracks in full-length, unmixed format, plus two DJ mixes from Andre Kronert and Snuff Crew. Some of the artists involved will be familiar (Harold Heath, Scoper & Bubba, El Provost, David Duriez), most of them won't, but pretty much every track is a winner. Deep, techy house is the order of the day, with some excursions into slightly funkier or slightly proggier territory, and the odd side serving of retro acid… which is pretty much where house is 'at' in 2011, for me.

In fact, if you came to me and said, "I've not been keeping up, where's house music at in 2011, Russ?" I'd tell you to buy this, buy the Smiley Fingers compilation and buy any of 90Watt's Sound Of Amsterdam compilations. Between 'em, THAT'S where house music is at.*

Out: Feb 7, so if you haven't bought it yet you really ought to.

About: Elevation are based in Galway in Eire, are run by a very amicable chap called Darren Nugent, and can be found on that t'internet here.

*Well all right, maybe get a So Sound comp for the more traditional west coast-y stuff as well. And one of Nang's nu-disco collections for that side of things. And one of Acryl's comps for the very deep side of things. But you get my point.

Juan Deminicis - Andalucia

Nah, couldn't do it. I meant to strike a blow for house music egalitarianism and inclusivity and other cuddly-lefty-liberal words with the Geisha Twins post... but imagine if I got run over by a bus tomorrow, and that was the last thing I ever wrote? Brrr.

So here's something MUCH tastier, two slices of deep-ish but driving techy-progginess from those ever-reliable chaps at Stripped Digital.

Phew. I'll be able to sleep tonight, now.

Out: This week. Ooh, actually, last week now. But hey.

About: I can't keep up with the Stripped family, they put out so much stuff! Here's their MySpace, just in case you haven't visited it 100 times already.

Deepfunk – Crystals

Just the two mixes here, which makes a nice change from labels putting out 11 mixes in the hope that ONE of 'em will catch on!

Crystals is a dark-ish, heads-down rumbler of a tune, coming from the deeper end of the prog spectrum. It's big, it's dramatic, it's brooding and exhilarating by turns… and it needs you to hear it, really, cos this kind of texture-based prog stuff is hard to describe in words.

S'good, though. So you see, we never did need those extra nine mixes!

Out: This week (NB: with everything posted today, 'this week' means 'in the week just gone' not 'in the week coming up'. Just so's we're clear)

About: This is on Stripped Recordings, who are always a solid bet for the tuffer/techier/proggier stuff that's nevertheless still definitely within the house arena. Find 'em online target="blank">here. Deepfunk, BTW, is apparently from Malta, though that's about as much as I can tell you.