Rush Hour just wants it, don't they? Here they are, rolling over from the year of their lives with a disco track that's both giddy and restrained, like a very smart dress that happens to look like a birthday cake. There's definitely an Ibizan breeze blowing through Tom Trago's new one, though it never gets totally barefoot in the head—your moves are limited on sand, and "Shutters" is definitely meant for moving. That dual quality comes out especially well as the instrumental flourishes grow wilder—swelling analog synth, slow-rising dub boing FX—over a groove that evokes expensive '80s synths as easily as it does hideously expensive '70s ones.
The dub ups the drama. Here, Trago puts everything through just enough filtering to make itself present but not the focus—tweaking the basic elements till they glow and smear, like neon in the rain. Suddenly, at about 3:10, everything slowly disintegrates, and the graininess of the sound reveals itself; when the instruments come back, they're in focus for a while, but soon things muddy again. It's a roller-coaster, and the side a lot of DJs prefer. I do too. But this release is as much a triumph of foundation as abstraction.
Buy Tom Trago - Shutters at
  
Tracklist: Tom Trago - Shutters
 A Shutter
B Shutter (Dub Mix)
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