EZLV: No Regrets EP
Seaking
Issued on the Montreal-based duo's own Seaking label, No Regrets is a new two-track outing from Deep House/Nu Disco producers Maxime Laverdière and Louis Vallières under the EZLV (Ezekiel and Louis Vee) name. Whereas the pair's bio is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek (a typical detail reports that they met in prison in 1982, Ezekiel having been incarcerated for molesting Michael Jackson's monkey and Louis Vee for wearing Margaret Thatcher's wedding dress), their music is anything but a joke.
The hard-grooving title track locks into position immediately, its crisp swing powered by claps, hi-hats, and a chunky synth bass pulse before the soulful vocal line surfaces to amp up the cut's sensual allure. Frothy vocal and synth episodes alternate, with Laverdière and Vallières nicely calibrating tension and release throughout the tune's six-minute strut. As infectious, “Speechless” cranks up the BPM ever so slightly, though not to the point of delirium. In place of the straight-up vocal on the title track, “Speechless” sprinkles its charging house groove with a dizzying swirl of chopped-up vocal effects; yet even in those passages where the vocals are stripped out, the duo's music entrances. Generally speaking, it would be hard to imagine any dance floor not filling up in response to quality cuts like these.March 2015