- Kevin McPhee's latest single on Idle Hands is his first for the Bristol label since 2011's Sleep. Since then McPhee has set aside the ramshackle, vocal-sampling melancholia he made his name with in favour of something more robust—last year's In Circles on WNCL could almost be considered peak-time.
Still, it seems there will always be some degree of bedroom intimacy to McPhee's productions. "Unwind" is perfectly pitched good-times house music, a loose-limbed beast built around jazzy stabs and a diva's languid call to "unwind yourself." "A-Jam," with its muted pads and rounded organ stabs, is like a bleary rendering of soulful New York house, while the looped vocal fragments sound oddly lacklustre, as if recently roused from a deep sleep. Both tracks handle house's signifiers in a relatively straightforward manner—McPhee has certainly had more original ideas elsewhere—but, as with much of his work, it's their subtle softness that makes them so inviting.
Tracklist A Unwind
B A Jam