Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

TUNES RECOVERY PROJECT: House of House – Rushing to Paradise (Walkin’ These Streets)

Clinic used to release stuff on a label called Aladdin’s Cave of Golf…



[Video][Website]
[7.12]

Chuck Eddy: ImpressionableTeen (1 month ago) Eat a dick, you fucking mong. You are a fucking spaztard, you fucking travesty. Jump off a bridge, idiot.
[4]

Alex Macpherson: Immaculately produced deep house bliss — almost too immaculate, as its painstaking revivalism means that it never quite shakes off something of a period-piece feel. It’s telling that its pivotal hands-in-the-air moment comes when its central piano riff morphs into an interpolation of Larry Levan’s remix of “Stand on the Word”, ushering in Saheer Umar’s soulful roar. Obviously, it still slays in warehouse raves at 4am.
[8]

Martin Skidmore: The R&B vocal sounds not just autotuned but mechanical enough to be computer-generated. The tune is pleasant enough, and the bleepy backing is nice. I think I’d like this with a brighter, more human singer.
[5]

Rodney J. Greene: Divide this 13-minute Larry Levan homage in half. For the first subtle 6.5, it may seem as though nothing is happening except for some pensive ivory-tickling and a bit of Daft Punk-circa-Homework whump and slice, but this section is a reminder that house is better felt than heard. Praises be to the Lords of House how this thing builds, moves, and creates. Then, at the exact midpoint, any use for subtlety is thrown out the window, all stops are off, and it’s fireworks, fireworks, and more fireworks from here on out. House pianos, gospel pianos, disco claps, big filter sweeps, choirs on high from Kilimanjaro, baritone male diva vocals growling about the dangerous city life. I hear New York, Africa, the AIDS epidemic, the Middle Passage; journeys through time and space. If there’s such a thing as Saturday night religion, then this is a blessing.
[10]

Martin Kavka: This retro-1992 piano house track would work much better as an edit; on too many occasions, I find myself waiting for the chord to change. But when the male vocalist — half Keith Thompson on “Break 4 Love,” half Sedric Johnson on “Carry Me Home” — comes in, it proves to have been very much worth the wait.
[8]

Ian Mathers: Is this the longest track we’ve ever tackled on the Jukebox? God knows it takes what seems like forever for the vocals to come in, and once they do things pick up considerably. The seven and a half minute preamble before the vocals come in isn’t bad exactly (there’s a bit during the sixth minute where the piano and the beat finally start playing off of each other that’s quite nice, actually), but it’s not until those vocals do start that the formerly anodyne piano house picks up a little speed and grit and the song switches from wallpaper to something more engaging and emotive. If there’s a decent single edit out there, it would rate a couple more points.
[5]

Erick Bieritz: The unsuspecting listener can be leveled by the sheer scope of “Rushing to Paradise.” There are warnings, particularly the way the piano unwinds so gradually in the beginning, but it’s still difficult to imagine the sheer size of the thing from just looking at the pieces of the song as they appear one by one. All of those pieces are making way for the voice itself, which is used so sparingly and would be lost in something as relatively restrained as a six- or seven-minute track. But here, hurtling over a rush of tambourines and synths and samples, the voice finds a home in which it cannot ever sound cliched or insincere, and in that way takes its place in the tradition of house music.
[9]

Michaelangelo Matos: Thirteen minutes that (a) fly by and (b) never sit still. And no, those are not the same thing by a long shot. The male diva could come in earlier and I wouldn’t complain, but all that pseudo-Balearic swirl that precedes him has its own kind of charge: airy, yes, but suggestive enough that when he finally blows the roof off the joint you’re totally ready for it.
[8]

9 Responses to “TUNES RECOVERY PROJECT: House of House – Rushing to Paradise (Walkin’ These Streets)”

  1. NO RADIO EDITS. I have never known a full-length dance track to be improved by a radio edit. Dance tracks are this long, you have to live with this fact.

  2. Ian: I’m thinking we may have tackled longer in our Boredoms special?

  3. As far as the edits question goes, lex is otm, but I have to defer to the always-insightful Sean “Diddy” Combs as quoted from DJ Hell’s “The DJ“:

    “You gotta hit ’em with that 13-, 14-minute version. You gotta just hit ’em with the shit where they marinate, where they just engulfed in the shit. I hate when a motherfucker play a four-minute version of a record. […] You can’t even get into your thing on a four-minute version.

    This goes out to all the motherfuckers who like 15-, 20-minute versions of a motherfuckin’ record. I’m sendin’ this to all the motherfuckers in the after-hours spots. Yeah, I’m not makin’ that just jump on the radio and be on top the charts. I’m just makin’ that shit for them motherfuckers that’s in the after-hours spot, them divided souls, them motherfuckers that’s catchin’ the holy ghost through the music.”

  4. YES! Also, there is a 28-minute Radio Slave remix of that Hell/Diddy track, where the garage piano drops in at the 22-minute mark.

  5. Yeah, my favorite part of that remix is when the beat drops from under the piano solo.

  6. So when’s Diddy gonna make a 10minute+ track?

    I’d like an edit of this too, to compliment/stand alongside the original (so I’ll just make my own heh) but this is pretty much a 10 for me anyway.

  7. This would be the OTHER song that I loved that I wish I had blurbed. Amazing that the Stush feels like ten minutes and this like three.

  8. I realized I used ‘anodyne’ wrong roughly an hour after it was too late to alter my blurb.

    God knows I love long tracks (in dance music and elsewhere), but the quiet opening half of this one never settled in for me, and honestly in general tracks past about 10 minutes don’t tend to work as singles for me.

    And yeah, we definitely had a 20-minute Boredoms one. I forgot!

  9. why did it take so long for a band to be named “House of House”?