- You could call it "passing the jiggle horizon": that moment of the night when the warm-up gets a little bit hotter, when the early dancers put their drinks down and their arms up, when the DJ knows they've got the crowd's attention. Usually it's the subtle builders that get us there. Ernest St. Laurent's "Clumsy Lobster" would be a longtime personal fave; more recently, Anthony Naples' "Mad Disrespect" has done the trick. Jay Shepheard's second album, Seeing Sound, provides eight new tunes that aim for, and often achieve, the very same effect.
While Shepheard's debut album, Home And Garden, offered a soundtrack to afterparty sofa sessions, Seeing Sound goes for the other end of the night. The UK-born, Berlin-based DJ has road-tested these tracks over the past year, and it shows: the vibrating basslines of "Beam Splitter" and "Spring Up" feel like a ripple moving through a club. Tracks like "Sweep D'Amore" and "Night Bells" boast the rolling 4/4 funk that parties like secretsundaze love. "Mover Friendly" is good enough to be a new Metro Area track, and the piano riff on "One Day City" sounds very early '90s (and thus, also very now). And while Shepheard might have turned the tempo up, "Ohm I" uses the same sort of structures and sounds we heard on Home And Garden, with languid melodies and murmuring vocals blurring into an understated breakdown that recalls Deep Dish circa 1998's Junk Science. They're all safe bets for the dance floor, which also means they steer clear of any risks.
Shepheard has said he wants Seeing Sound to be "a collection of go-to club tracks"—consider that mission accomplished—that are "simultaneously working together as a whole." He hasn't quite pulled off that last part, simply because there's not that much difference in style or a sense of progression here. You can easily listen to any of these tracks in isolation or the whole thing on shuffle without losing too much. But what you'll really miss at home is the atmosphere of a primed dance floor that Shepheard so convincingly conjures up, a place where Seeing Sound makes you desperately want to go.
Tracklist01. Spring Up
02. Ohm I
03. Mover Friendly
04. Beam Splitter
05. One Day City
06. Dance Language
07. Sweep D'Amore
08. Night Bells