Presently the brains behind Freerange Records and Delusions of Grandeur, Jamie Odell aka Jimpster has been in the game for the past 20 years. On his sixth studio album Porchlight and Rockingchairs, he plies a warm and genuine sort of deep house that is so often absent from current electronic music.
As with a majority of Odell’s output, the arrangement and production levels are faultless, effortlessly smooth to the point of perfection. But the tracks that eschew the uber-polished sheen for (slightly) more rugged textures are the ones that really shine. The title track for instance is slickly assembled, but offset by a rawness around the edges, with its frayed beats and dirty murmur of bass. The same can be said for ‘Cracks In The Pavement’ and ‘The Glowing Embers’, both of which inject a touch of satisfying cragginess – probably something to do with Odell’s return to hardware synths and drum machines as opposed to computer plugins.
The most floor-friendly – and yet the darkest – of the bunch is ‘Roller Girl’, propelled by a cosmic synth pulse and a raw crack of techno percussion. It’s a tense groove that’ll keep late-night dancefloors locked.
Equally standout tracks come from the other end of the spectrum. For instance, the silky ‘Wanting You’ is a dreamily heart-warming number that clocks in at a mere three minutes: tinkling bells surround a swelling, choir-esque mantra. Similarly, ‘These Times’, and to a lesser extent ‘Brought To Bar’, resemble pop songs with their tender guest vocals.
Odell isn’t trying to break any new ground here, but by focusing on the emotive and in enlisting the plain charm of hardware he has produced a deep house album with genuine soul and warmth.
Freerange | Released: May
01. Jasmine Dragon
02. Dance Of The Pharoes
03. Hold My Hand
04. Brought To Bare ft. Jonatan Bäckelie
05. High Wire
06. Rollergirl
07. Wanting You
08. Porchlight and Rockingchairs
09. Cracks In The Pavement
10. Towards The Seer
11. The Glowing Embers
12. These Times ft. Jinadu (LP Version)
