Morning Sun

Like an all-nighter afterthought, Block 16 forage for that headachy post-club demographic by sounding like a percussionist wailing on a large assortment of cookware. Pete Z, the keyboard player from retro-dance outfit Faze Action, studio bobbin Raj Gupta (Ray Mang, Laj), and roving DJ Glen Gunner form the core triumvirate here, roping in collaborators like house vocalist Robert Owens and once-Shamen diva Jhelisa Anderson to try and combine layered Latin bop, mud-and-funk jazz, and rumbling Ibiza house with the distracted cool of French disco. But for all its trussed-up host of intentions, the LP can't help but feel terribly resigned. The broad intermingling goes nowhere in particular, forcing you to recall the likes of Dimitri From Paris or Slag Boom Van Loon slumming it, and only when it tends to get down and dirty, as in "And Voodoo," does the album procure a sort of groovy feng shui few others have ever had the audacity to investigate.