[Ostgut Ton]

While I never doubted the supreme bump and grind Ms. Steffie Doms achieves on her debut full-length, Yours & Mine, I wasn’t always sure how to approach it as an album. When I’m listening to a long-player, I don’t necessarily want to be “in the club” all the time. And Steffi has certainly taken us there before. “Kill Me,” her debut solo 12″, along with her recent “Reasons” release on Underground Quality, both missile-lock on a groove with precise elegance: they’re manifestations of house music at its most powerfully direct, with absolutely no excess fat to trim. Her tracks don’t all sound the same, but her discography doesn’t yet boast the sort of breadth of styles that often makes for solid artist albums; and the clips that started popping up late last fall made it apparent Steffi wasn’t straying too far from her bread and butter. A producer doesn’t have to faithfully execute 15 genres and 46 different tempos, but an album should take you somewhere, maybe to a place we’ve yet to go with her.

The idea of an album’s worth of Steffi bangers is of course tasty for DJs, but it’s a whole lot of thump for mere listeners to size up. But what I’ve come to realize about Yours & Mine — what’s brought me around to how lovely it is — is that she makes it work by making it personal. While these nine blistering house tracks adhere to the fundamentals with the sort of zeal we expect from Ostgut Ton, they don’t militantly tow some line about what house music should be or mean. Instead, Steffi is inviting us into her love affair with this stuff, taking us deep inside her personal party space. Whether you’re there on a packed night or have the dance floor all to yourself, it’s a pretty fantastic place to be.

Nine dance cuts back-to-back is indeed a hefty load, but I’m hesitant to recommend approaching this set any other way. Fixating on one or two or four cuts from the bounty will surely cause you to leave something out. For DJs, Yours & Mine might be one of the best things to happen to your record bag in quite some time; given a time slot long enough, you could conceivably work all of these into a single set without boring anyone. But while the quality is uniform — each track is good in more or less the same way — Steffi switches up the small things enough to keep you from overexerting yourself. From the vocal-driven devastation of “Yours ft. Virginia” (a step up in form from the already excellent “Reasons”) to the Fred P-reminiscent dreaminess of “Arms” and “Nightspacer” to the razor-sharp pulse of “Mine,” Steffi gives us a reading of house that feels both unabashedly reverent and utterly contemporary. In other words, she lets house get back to being house, freeing it from the sort of polemics that sometimes accompany this kind of thing (think Midtown 120 Blues or Shedding The Past). For Steffi, the strongest argument for house is the sound itself, and I’m hard-pressed to think of something more persuasive.

Yours & Mine is in no way a departure: she’s still utilizing the same crisp sounds and clear arrangements that thus far been her signature. Though she’s apparently been working on music for quite some time, her discography is still rather short, and I think putting together an album of wildly new sounds would have been premature. The album is instead a crystallization of a particular feeling, one Steffi has been kind enough to share with us. While I don’t foresee a time when this thing leaves my bag, I also see it digging its heels into my iPod. Whether driving an epic party of thousands or a bedroom freakout of one, Yours & Mine is about as right-on as house music gets.