Kerri Chandler: The Thing for Linda 2010 (Downtown 161)

Not for a minute has anyone ever overlooked a record from Kerri Chandler, but some are more popular than others. This handsome repress from Downtown 161 of the 2010 edition in The Thing For Linda series should go down as one of his finest.

Writers are hacks and whores, there’s not a single one in dance music these days who isn’t moonlighting on the side and pumping out the kind of hyperbole they roll their eyes at when they have to read it in promotional sheets. We need a new language now because of that – because so many records have been defined as “flawless” when they’re really just “pretty good.” The Thing for Linda 2010 is that: it’s flawless, as in without a flaw, four tracks and you can’t point to a single note out of place or anything that could be done better or to better effect. It’s like Kerri took everything he’d learned and it all came down to this: the slow motion motor boogie fading in over a chill backbeat and chiller vocal demanding to know the answer to a series of questions that still animate bloggers’ need for clicks six years later. “Forty-eight thousand releases digitally?” That was astonishing in 2010. I can only imagine how many there are now.

The legend on The Thing for Linda 2010 read, “Records are forever held on to, files are not.” This wasn’t a popular notion in 2010, the year that basically Soulful House shit the bed and began trying to make something that should be the opposite of generic with assembly line techniques. Maybe that’s the message of the oddball track of this record – the smoother-than-smooth “Kerri Bacharach” which seems to have grown 10 times more brilliant and bright in my eyes since I last heard it. In fact, I’d say it’s now the highlight, because the message of the legend may have faded or grown, it may have been ignored, disdained or even acknowledged and understood and followed by some of the new titans of the vinyl-driven Deep House industry but beyond credos or inspo quotes, there’s nothing like a song stands the test of time. This does.