25 Years Later

25 Years Later is New Jersey deep house as a concept album on Motown, Blaze building something ambitious and unusual that almost nobody heard at the time. It's a record that treats house as a vehicle for real songwriting and conceptual scope, gospel-inflected and genuinely soulful, and its obscurity says more about its bad luck than its quality. It ranks at a hundred and eighty-seven because it's a lost record rather than a canonical one, but the ambition and the soul are real, and it deserved a better fate.