Incredibly nocturnal and hypnotic, propelled from the beginning of the first set to the end of the second with gigantic basslines and murky vocal dubs, Deep Dish's debut mix for the long-running Global Underground series is absolutely enveloping. It submerses you with its weight and its darkness as well as its numbing sense of bliss. Where much of progressive house around the time of this album's release in late 2001 had become too melancholic and weighed down for its own good, feeling more like a come-down than a sensual ...
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Incredibly nocturnal and hypnotic, propelled from the beginning of the first set to the end of the second with gigantic basslines and murky vocal dubs, Deep Dish's debut mix for the long-running Global Underground series is absolutely enveloping. It submerses you with its weight and its darkness as well as its numbing sense of bliss. Where much of progressive house around the time of this album's release in late 2001 had become too melancholic and weighed down for its own good, feeling more like a come-down than a sensual rush, Dubfire and Sharam don't fall victim to these tendencies on Global Underground: Moscow like they had a few months earlier on their lumbering Yoshiesque, Vol. 2 mix. First of all, they drop plenty of vocal tracks. These aren't your traditional vocal house tracks, but rather the sort of vocal dubs that bury the often muted and stoned-sounding vocals in the music rather than overwhelm you with singsong excess. Secondly, they drop the right tracks at the right times, namely surefire tracks like their own remixes of Dido's "Thank You" and iio's "Rapture" along with other similar tracks like Sander Kleinenberg's remix of PMT's "Deeper Water" and 16b's remix of John Creamer & Stephane K.'s "I Wish You Were Here." These tracks were some of the year's best progressive house productions and all feature the same sort of sexy vocals that the duo litter throughout this mix. In fact, you can't help but keep coming back to the vocals that seem to fade in and out of the mix every few minutes, never too upfront in the mix, always fading out before you've had enough. Dubfire and Sharam obviously recognize the Global Underground series' reputation and have put meticulous care into this mix, which they not only mixed but also "edited and tweaked" at their studio with the assistance of Richard Morel, according to the liner notes. And this isn't surprising given this mix's almost overdone feeling of craft. DJ mixes aren't supposed to sound this seamless or this glossy, but you really can't complain when the results are this wonderful. Suddenly, even when things get a little excessive halfway through the second set, the underwhelming Yoshiesque, Vol. 2 mix of a few months earlier seems peripheral and forgivable. Dubfire and Sharam obviously were saving all their best tracks and funneling their concerted efforts into this mix, which is surely one of the best and most unique the too often formulaic Global Underground series has to offer. ~ Jason Birchmeier, Rovi
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