Completely unannounced, with no digital promo, no Bandcamp link, comes what should be a huge summer smash. Failing that a real winter warmer. Pressed as a super limited stack of screen-printed, hand-stamped 12”s, which went on sale just over a week ago at Soho’s Sounds Of The Universe, Earth Angel is a new collaborative project from Richard “Parrot” Barratt, aka The Crooked Man. 

Consisting of four proper songs, presented across nine increasingly wonky mixes, it’s a total joy from start to finish. With each cut club worthy, and the album perfect for an “afters” – provided you’re prepared from some sticky scenes. For me it both recalls and updates the slower, post-“Summer Of Love” / spring 1990 sound – of Soul II Soul and Movement 98 – when pilled-up smiley people had sex back on their minds- rather than “Who’s got some water?” It could be my tanking testosterone levels, but this is the horniest record that I’ve heard in a long time. 

Happy is a piece of soulful pop, whose drum machines make a Sexual Healing-like tick tock, deep within the track’s dark electro-edged Bomb The Bass-esque boom. A dynamite diva shining through, full of love and light, while the riffs sound like a rave anthem pitched to half, quarter speed. Its Dub Me Happy counterpart begins with an epic echoed acapella intro, before building, and building, to accommodate a little acid. Experiencing this on E in a warehouse environment I think that I might explode. The dissected vocal panning, disorientating. Like an insistent up-for-it angel inside your head.  

Really Really would be more straight forward jeep beat / street soul, if weren’t for the  titanic tides of machined hand claps that rebound and repeat into infinity. With a lyric that’s heartbroken and betrayed, and a strong lovers rock / reggae sound system influence, it beefs up yesterday’s Balearic beats. Stuff like MoccaSoul and The Beloved’s Time After Time are an all be it tamer point of reference. 

There’s a lovely lovers lick of Donna McGhee’s old rare groove hit, It Ain’t No Big Thing, which is easily the LP’s “fluffiest” moment. This, however, also gets a room-shaking robotic reading, and then a Part 3, showered with Sci-Fi effects and a far-out fusion synth, which is pure aural porn. Barry White by way of Smith & Mighty and Jah Shaka. Guaranteed to put you in the mood for making lurrrrrve.

If The Bomb Squad’s `80s productions for Public Enemy were multilayered, precision tooled works of sonic terrorism, ultra-detailed designs to educate and agitate, then Earth Angel’s expert erotic reductions are kind of the exact opposite. I suspect that these songs were also once packed with instrumental ingredients. Even though they’re now stripped down to bare, naked essentials, there’s a real sense of “density”. Something subliminal remains, seducing your subconscious. The mission, rather than incite a riot, to address the rapidly declining birth rate.

The bottom-end throughout is so heavy it’s hypnotic but Move Me No Mountain boasts seismic LFO-like speaker-shafting subs. In its alternate mix, Moveturnswimlongdub, devastated by delay, and world-warping washes of reverb, these are of such force that I swear I can feel the sound waves pressing against my skin. 

The set is sequenced so that the “straighter” readings and dubs are all jumbled up, with themes fading, mutating, and reappearing. By the time I got to the closing, Make Me Dubby, an intoxicating take on the opener, I was exhausted. Spent. Banged silly by a musical massage with the high of a hundred happy endings.

I’ve no idea when this will be officially released but Sounds Of The Universe still have copies in stock.