Hear vinyl

One of New York deep house's foremost day ones returns to the limelight with a fresh 12-track mini-album, showing the yutes how it's done with an onslaught of unlikely-sounding beats, cuts and breaks. All tracks on Hear are loose and lackadaisical, often forgoing the need so behooved by many house music producers to get the transient design - the snap of the hit, the length of the tail - just right; Joey's drums are wide and ungated, seeming to prove the point that minutiae don't tend to make a tune. It's instead the ineffable quality of "nailing the vibe", the nuts and bolts of which we can't claim to know, that convince us of Pal Joey's expertise. 'We Show Off' is the gem on this self-released album, with its dreamy, vocoded and slowed acapella, crude car-horn synths and glossed-out backing washes.