Sinner

Last spring, a new Moodymann album popped up on dance music sites listed only as “coming soon.” A single dropped and vanished, but June came and went with no full-length follow-up to his 2014 self-titled album. At that point, the Detroit producer also known as Kenny Dixon, Jr. had begun showing up in places far outside the dance music underground. Even in his years-long absence, he could be heard purring “fuck dat shit” on Drake’s “Passionfruit” and DJing Prince obscurities around the world. With little effort on his end, his woozy, soul-rooted take on house music had infiltrated everyone from Channel Tres and Motor City Drum Ensemble to Caribou’s Daphni alias.

In January, a rumor spread that he had handed out a few copies of his lost album, which subsequently wound up selling for upwards of $500. As of now, it still has not been officially released. Deep in the Ring-esque video for “I’ll Provide,” the lead-off track on Sinner, the fate of that original album is finally revealed, as Dixon dumps entire bags of them into a garbage can.

Sinner now arrives with little explanation. Does it replace the lost album? Is it a stopgap? The double vinyl has five tracks, while the Bandcamp version gets fleshed out with last year’s single and a few other goodies. Song by song—even moment by moment—it shows Dixon pulling in multiple directions. The music teems with small details, but it doesn’t feel dense, just more diffuse, harder than ever to grasp. It is also some of the most immersive he’s ever made.

“I’ll Provide” is seductive and menacing, driving and aching, his most claustrophobic track since “Freeki Mutha F cker.” But where that track was sleek and seductive, “I’ll Provide” is hurt, forlorn, desperate. Heaving synth strings, pulsing in-the-red bass, overdriven acid lines, digital glitching, crowd noise, a relentless kick—they all jostle for space on the track without affecting its aerodynamics one iota. Atop it all, Moodymann slots in killer couplets—“I got something/For all your dirty, nasty needs,” “Drunk and high/I’ll provide”—that evoke the backing tracks of Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Sometimes whispered, other times whooped from across the room, they make the track feels rowdy and confessional at once.

“Got Me Coming Back Rite Now” barely tops 100 bpm, but the house track bustles with sound, from Moody’s vocal scats and crisp hi-hats to dramatic strings and the whoosh of passing traffic. Relaxed as it sounds, there’s an unsettled, on-edge quality to it. As it shuffles towards its inevitable climax, Moody again growls like a man in conflict, offering to do the chores as well as “tie you down on this here floor.”

There isn’t really a weak moment: “I Think of Saturday” already feels like a peak-time classic, erected atop a Linn drum sample worthy of the Purple One. Dixon’s utterance of the word “church” alone can make you a believer. Again, Moody roves between nonchalance and urgency, rattling off the days of the week as if he’s merely waiting for the weekend. But another pass through the song reveals that for each day, he hasn’t heard from his crush, so that rather than the weekend offering release, it only increases the desperation. A perfectly placed drop into Joe Simon’s “With You in Mind” instead accentuates that mind in the throes of such an unrequited obsession.

“If I Gave U My Love” is more audacious with the source material, interweaving legends like Camille Yarbrough and Al Green into a mosaic. They are both iconic voices—Yarbrough’s will be most familiar to listeners as the source material for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”—and Moody even samples the same moment. But as church organ swirls, Moody manages to twist the overly familiar into something newly strange and ecstatic. Even for longtime fans of Moodymann that know his penchant with an MPC, these tracks find him pushing towards new ground.

The back half of the set gets stranger, slower. “Downtown” is a noodly smooth jazz jam that first appeared as “Pitch Black City Reunion” last year. “Deeper Shadow” is neo-soul with a bit of razorous psychedelic guitar added to darken the mood. “8 Mile D Boy” is a rare bit of fidgety electro from the man, but paired with the admission “I’m so sorry,” it’s a party track with a conflicted emotion at its core. The title track finds Moody at his simmering, neo-soul best, flickering in and out of focus and drawing everything down by singing about a “lonely winner” who “sat in your lonely dark room listening to Dilla/ hoping they would remember.” Knowing his own deep connection with the fellow Detroiter, one wonders if Moody is not singing about an object of his affection, but rather his own self? Like the man himself, he is in no rush to dispel that mystery.