review
Dosem opens Desire up to three guest vocalists
Three guest vocalists carry the record's best stretches, the clearest evidence that Dosem built this one for other people rather than the solitude behind Dream Decoder.
deepmelodic
Twelve tracks, forty-six minutes and change, and three of them hand the microphone to somebody else. The bass doesn't let up under any of them, guest vocal or not. That's new for Dosem. Dream Decoder, his 2020 debut for the label, was a solitary record. Long stretches in Tokyo. A theory that linked dreams to parallel universes. Fifteen tracks that don't do much talking. Desire, out August 30 on Anjunadeep, isn't that record. It's built for other people, and the guest list is the proof.
Dosem calls it "a return to my roots," in his own words: "my homage to and vision of progressive house, a genre that had a significant impact on me when I first started listening to electronic music." That's a specific claim, and it checks out. He's spent the years since Dream Decoder working most corners of the room. Releases on Toolroom and John Digweed's Bedrock, a regular seat behind Anjunadeep's own Anjunadeep Edition series, his own label, Houstrike. Desire's him coming back to the label that put out his debut album, and doing it as a homecoming rather than a reinvention.
The three vocal tracks are where the sequencing puts its weight. "Ethernal" pairs him with HANA, whose own catalogue runs warmer and more song-shaped than his. Against his rolling low end, her top line does the work atmosphere used to do on Dream Decoder. "Answer" is the one we keep coming back to. SOHMI's on it a few tracks later, and the arpeggiator that runs the whole way through is as classic-Dosem as this record gets. The breakdown skips the usual filter sweep for adlibs and spoken lines instead, and that's what makes it the closest thing here to a straight vocal house cut. "Cold Shores" closes things out. Carla Werner over a tempo that's already come down from the record's peak. It's the oldest trick in a set-closer's book, and it still works here because the track earns the descent instead of announcing it. A quarter of a twelve-track album handed to other voices isn't nothing, and none of the three reads like a verse bolted onto an instrumental. They're the songs the record's built around.
The vinyl release backs that up. Two discs, the album proper on the first, extended mixes of eleven of the twelve tracks on the second. That's a DJ's format, not a casual listener's, and Anjunadeep's betting these get played out rather than streamed once on a drive somewhere. Cold Shores is the one track that skips the extended treatment, and that tracks. It's the come-down, and a come-down doesn't need eight more minutes to make its point.
Where does the record land? More than one place. The first half is club-built, straightforward enough to open or hold a room. "Sunsetter," three tracks from the end, is the pivot — his own description, "the sunset of an eternal summer," fits it exactly, built for the hour a festival stage starts throwing longer shadows, when the crowd hasn't decided yet whether it wants a peak or a walk to the bar. From there the vocal tracks and the tempo drop take the record down, and "Cold Shores" closes it out at the bottom of that curve. Desire covers more of a set than any one of its parts — the terrace hour is just the one Dosem named.
Four years is a long gap for a producer who's stayed this visible the whole time. The Anjunadeep Edition slot, other people's remixes, the festival stages in between. Desire reads like the gap was intentional. Not a block, but time spent deciding the next Dosem album should sound like a room full of people instead of one man and a theory about dreams. It does.