We tolerate the 90s!
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[5.50]
Anthony Easton: It has a potential to be a grimy sexy funk/disco breakdown, and places are genuinely gorgeous (especially the synths). I think that the Mainline here is a train metaphor, because it reminds me of the Quad City DJs. But it goes on too long, and it fails to achieve the meditative balance where a good breakdown (to continue the train metaphor) lets us ride to the end of the line.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: Trad house remains one of the most purely joyous musics accessible to a twenty-first-century sensibility.
[8]
Alfred Soto: The dinky organ and bobbing sequencer line is purest 1992, and if the vocal had more charisma it’d be Saturday night at the Warsaw Ballroom.
[7]
Will Adams: Once the ’90s-house nostalgia mongering wears thin, there are some terrible vocals to cleanse the palate. I appreciate that Tensnake is so committed to verisimilitude. It just happens to be dreadful verisimilitude.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Worked as an exercise in house shuffle; the vocals are similarly studied, though, and that don’t hunt.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: It’s hard to deny the simple pleasures of simple, effective house music, but then I played it next to some of the records whose ghosts I can hear in it (Robin S, Alex Party, K Klass, you know, every bad and every amazing record from the years surrounding 1992) and it didn’t sparkle quite as brightly. The song seems a formality, as an excuse to string some pleasing noises together to hit a particular kind of nostalgia, and it’s a trick that nearly works for me but it doesn’t introduce any pleasures of its own.
[5]