Avalon Emerson - Caroline

On a surface level, Bay Area musician Avalon Emerson’s new track Caroline – recent recipient of the Beats In Space seal of approval – is a straight-up throwback to the golden era of house, with funk guitar loops, a breaks-heavy backing track, snippets of piano and an authentic approximation of a classic vocal. It’s all a little bit too skewed to be written off as retro though, its sound palette way too rough around the edges for it to have been plundered directly from the 1988-94 era. The goofball funk doesn’t play out too straight-faced and, perhaps most importantly, it pounds too. Solid.