Luomo: The Present Lover

The belt-snapping champion of microhouse, a genre that takes aim at a target hung on dance music's periphery, Luomo crafts immaculate tracks full of tweaks, teases, and taunts. His music courses with all the glistening precision of top-shelf trance, but it's also subtle and surprising enough to kindle a weird sort of internal subversion. "When I visit you, I miss you," explain the opening lines of "Visitor," a misty, beatless opener that ends with a detached diva voice intoning "I'm boiling in your cold." Such emotional dissonance tingles all over The Present Lover, a dance album that services song and mood as strongly as beats and bass. Luomo laid out a microhouse manifesto in his vaunted 2000 album Vocalcity, which merged the loop-allergic ambient dub he made under the name Vladislav Delay with a drive designed for the dance floor. The Present Lover lacks some of Vocalcity's shiver-to-shine trajectory, but its elevated palette proves even more gorgeous and absorbing. The title track floats over a thick base, its vocal stutters and side-to-side shakes steering between upright pillars like a hot-air balloon with four-wheel drive. "Body Speaking" charts a sensual glide that climaxes in a scat-singing pastiche pitched somewhere between an orgasmic moan and mournful hesitation. Back-and-forth vocals between a man and a woman give the album the feel of love letters never sent—all mixed signals and passions withheld. Luomo's production straddles a similar mood, laying brittle, steely nuances into tracks whose tensions come in part from their fitful relationship with perfection. The Present Lover's high-gloss finish leans toward fashion-friendly boutique music, but the album quivers and trembles beneath skin that proves both comely and deceiving.