Quiet Village

With an opening track that ruminates on an extended sample of one of the most melodramatic songs in soul music history — the Chi-Lites’ "The Coldest Day Of My Life” — Quiet Village serve notice that they’re the newest contestants in the two-decade-old practice of retrofitting vintage soul music for contemporary ears. Following a trail blazed by Coldcut and Pete Rock, records like these usually consist of well-chosen samples barely bumped with extraneous production touches. The epic nature of the source material speaks for itself but gains new meaning in its tweaked context. There’s a fine line between wholesale thievery and the right amount of new ideas, which makes such projects difficult to pull off. When it works, it sounds effortless. Song titles like "Too High To Move” and "Keep On Rolling” indicate what frame of mind you should be in to appreciate this.