Ron Morelli - Heart Stopper (2023)

L.I.E.S. capo Morelli allows for more classic club emotion in his raw disco-house buckers on the label’s 200th release – RIYL Traxx, Daft Punk, Adonis, Legowelt.

‘Heart Stopper’ was recorded 2019-2022 and bears strong traces of Morelli’s tenure in Paris manifest in its french touch filter-house nudges and kinky gallic gait, which finely balances the album’s more scowling industrial parts, made with a relatively heart-on-sleeve style of melodic sequencing, vocal parts and craftier rhythm programming – and crucially less distortion – than his previous work, giving it legs and spirit for time to come.

Arriving like one of Jamal Moss’ Members Only edits with the psych-house jakbeat ‘House Music Revenge’, Morelli stirs some Euro flavour into it with the peppery EBM/new beat-adjacent ‘Heart Stopper’ and ‘Just Another Old Beat Track;’and cuts loose with the drum machine attack on ’Subway Shootout’, machine rhythms imitating gunfire. He comes on haughtier and brooding with the Carpenterian mood and jakbeat slug of ‘Ron’s Torture’, and ‘Tangled Trap of Love’ makes a strong use of unidentified female vox on a puckered EBM beat. ‘Rule is to Survive’ accounts for the LP’s freakiest Chicago inspirations, a la Hieroglyphic Being, and the strapping closer ‘Natural Deaths’ evokes New Order scoring Escape From New York.

Best he’s ever done, basically.