*** Junior Vasquez

2

(Ruffhouse/Columbia)

and

JUNIOR WORKS

(Eightball)

DJ Junior Vasquez continues to craft, sublimely, his sumptuous, sweet-toned brand of deep house. In his mixes pulse, throb, and vocal cries serve as melody, rhythm, and lyric; every track shimmers with hooky tidbits of sound. Hard without being heavy, his music has slink and delicacy, always. He shifts from silence to sound effects and from chants to riffs as seamlessly as from diva cries to echo or percussion, always going for the lissome tone as he elasticizes the rhythm this way and that.

On 2, he tickles the dancer through spacy spice like Jestofunk's "Stellar Funk," Daniel Tenaglia's "Elements," and Future Primitive's "The Future." And he highlights the lovin'-yourself moments in Club 59's "Drama," Sandy B's "Ain't No Need To Hide," Lydia Rhodes's "Away" (don't miss this cut), and Ron Perkov's "Dance with Me," pushing the throb, pressing the music constantly to take things higher and higher. Junior Works, meanwhile, is the Vasquez style applied to a selection of Eightball releases -- several of them Vasquez's own productions and therefore easy to tailor to the master's style of glamor and gladness in search of the highest sky's-the-limit and the deepest pulse-the-box.

-- Michael Freedberg