Dancin’ In The Streets

" 'Dancin' in the Streets' is another knotty Northern masterwork from the enigmatic Tom Boogizm, a double album of gauzy outsider bloooz adorned with eccentric asides, personal revelations and fuzzed recollections, connecting dots between Movietone, Prince, The Durutti Column, Dean Blunt, Time is Away.

Scrub the web's top layer for evidence of Tom Boogizm’s existence and you'll be hit with anecdotal proof at best, a roll call of locals glazing the Wigan-born DJ and producer, but little or nothing from the man himself. And truthfully, that makes his music all the more enticing; with no digital footprint to boot us onto dry land, we're forced to immerse ourselves fully in the tunes. "We're livin' in hard times," he repeats laggardly on opener 'I H T', calling out over DIY acoustic guitar strums, and an unexpectedly florid refrain from flautist Adam Sinclaire.

Boogizm's atmospheric blues wraps itself in different colours, juxtaposing its inherent browbeaten monochrome with strangely optimistic shades. A seasoned record collector of the best sort, he’s always been hard to place, haphazardly swerving from busted boogie to drill, punk, noise and mutant musics of all stripes, and he lets the boundaries fully crumble on this one. There's the kaleidoscopic surrealism of dream pop, the sensual humidity of flamenco and grime's brawny audaciousness, wiping tears into blushing streaks.

He's not alone this time, either. Cansu Kandemir lends her smoky, jazzy vocals to two tracks, almost whispering over Boogizm's skeletal footwork-adjacent toms and gliding squares on the brilliant 'Not 2Nite' and floating across the feathery 'Senle'. On the former, Boogizm chops a crackly Mobb Deep-like piano sample into a subtle hook, adding Vini Reilly prangs as emotional accents to Kandemir's soft-focus coos, and on the latter, her voice warps and blurs next to Boogizm's dubby incidentals. 

"You won't leave me alone," deadpans local poet and artist Ruby Conner on the dreamlike 'n lascivious 'Real Hardcore Pleasure'. Shadowing Boogizm's sardonic observations, Conner skewers mannered poetic form, rattling off personals-style lines ("come and try me out / mischievous female, comfortable in most situations") while wah-wah'd funk licks slobber onto the clammy, sub-heavy atmosphere. It's only short, but plays as the perfect foreword to the magic 'Operation Always Be A Brave Little C*nt', a torched modern post-punk anthem that echoes the euphoric high points of Boogizm's notoriously monumental DJ sets. On album closer 'IGOTDRONESINMYBONES’, Boogizm stops time, calling pal Juan Camilo to deploy some Spanish-language narration over his industrial scrapes and Sinclaire's wailed flute.

It's a conclusion that we can't stop rolling over in our heads, double underlining eleven giddy outsider expositions with a single swell of nail-biting darkness that's better than most self-consciously "experimental" records that breeze thru these parts. "

- Boomkat