The second full-length outing from Chicago producer and DJ Marvin Louis Burns, better known as Lil Louis, begins with international hit “Club Lonely” and its unforgettable album intro, the now-iconic-in-house-music-circles spoken word interchange between ‘Miss Thing’ and the club security, the doorman’s words “There is no guest list tonight!” ringing out over a pair of perfectly trimmed and clipped organ chords bouncing on top of an exemplar Chicago deep house groove. “Club Lonely” is a much-loved club classic, with its combination of a sensuous, silky groove and the sexy-yet-sad vocal hook reeking of understated class, and it sets the tone for the rest of the album. It’s Chicago house, so this is party music, but it comes with an additional sense of world-weary melody to it, too. There are plenty of jazz-flavoured touches — minor 9th chords and slick saxophone samples abound — but the jazz influence goes deeper too: you can hear it in the swing and stroll of some of his basslines, his brand of dancefloor-inducing euphoria, the product of sophisticated, sexy, carefully assembled house grooves with the shuffle and skip in their groove descended from generations of jazz rhythmic innovations. 

Journey… performs a masterclass in programming, too, as side two ever-so-gently moves from party-flavoured house to midtempo soul jazz, gradually lowering the tempo and increasing the temperature, before segueing effortlessly into a gloriously percussion-heavy Latin jazz album crescendo. No one does disco melancholy quite like Lil Louis and this album is an enigmatic ember of dancefloor emotion, glowing in the dark of the 4/4 night.