Spiritual Life Music

Unless your boogie music pulses with the angular whomp of the Roland 808 and is wailed over by a white girl in a zebra-print mini and mullet, consider it incredibly passe. Radio Shack electro is king, even if for just one more millisecond, and the ancient, deep house message is about as hep as Grandma's knobby corns. But to those who still get felt by it?the brighter and long gone days of the house music dream?it's really no big thing.

Spiritual Life sounds like a sweet-tasting flashback to a more idealistic dance music time, but the exceptionally well-crafted music on this NY-based label?fronted by DJ/producer Joaquin "Joe" Claussell, of the Body & Soul party?expands beyond the limits of prehistoric house and is quite simply beautiful music. Although words like "sophisticated" and "tasteful" are not adjectives I prefer to attach to ass-pumping dance music, the levels of musicianship, and in particular the core inclusion of virtuoso live players and vocalists, bring this collection infinite steps beyond the typical rare disco and funk-sampled house music scheme. Here the label's finest artists?like New Jersey-based atmospheric house trippers SLAM MODE, old-school heads Ten City, Mateo & Matos, Blaze, Jephté Guillaume, Kerri Chandler and Claussell?concoct a relatively languid, chimerical garage house sound that embraces uptempo jazz, space walk dub, melancholic soul and Claussell's most noted style, African and Latin percussion.

But do not call this world music. Far too often the dance music press approaches African, Asian and Latin music with an unchecked Eurocentricism, preferring to describe the music like a spicy plate of food (this song has African "flavors," this track is "infused" with Brazilian beats). While countless European artists take African and Latin samples and revamp them into something a younger, hipper Paul Simon might get funky to, Claussell and his labelmates go straight to the source with the likes of Haitian-born Guillaume and Fela Kuti's ex-drummer, the West African-raised Ola Jagun. With Spiritual Life Music, one never gets the sense that African or Latin idioms are meant to pepper the landscape, but are instead rooted firmly at the stylistic center.

Guillaume opens the second cd with the acoustic mix of "The Prayer," an uncommonly gorgeous, bittersweet melody that will make the eyes tear easily, particularly if one was recently dumped. Ten City's classic garage anthem "Nothing's Changed" perks up the trip with its unforgettable chorus and slinky, funked-up keyboard soul, while a lush, shadowy dub esthetic reverberates through Mateo & Matos' "Mixed Moods" and on SLAM MODE's "Life" and "Clouds." An almost soft, preternatural sensibility pulses through each track; and rarely is any song aggressively geometric, which, I suppose, is bad news for impatient mullet-bearers who simply want to jerk it.