Foundation

A song album more than an innovation, and few house records have this much heart. Gospel house gets a full-bodied treatment on Ten City's Foundation, where songs, voices and dancefloor rhythm are treated as the same language. The result gave house a sense of ensemble at a moment when much of the genre still arrived as tracks, and the emotion is carried by the songs themselves.

Byron Stingily's falsetto over Marshall Jefferson's production, written in the Philadelphia soul tradition rather than assembled for a DJ. That's the Way Love Is is the one everyone knows. The album around it is where house's gospel and disco parentage sits in plain view.