Bicep @ Sub Club, 24 November

Old and bitter house DJs will tell you that the movement never went away; young and stupid ones will cravenly compare it to the Second Coming (more like the twentieth); the rest of you are probably just hoping it doesn't portend a demonic pact between Pat Sharp, Noel Edmonds and Mr Blobby.

As is usually the case, there's a bit more to it than that. Over the last few years, Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar have assembled a not insubstantial body of 12" singles, many of which take a lead from Kerri Chandler's roundhousing 909 kicks and the hopscotch arrangements of Marc Kinchen. But, as their Feel My Bicep blog illustrates, their tastes stretch a little bit beyond labels such as KMS and King Street Records. Records from acid house pioneers Phuture, French new wave producer Le Syndicat Electronique, and jazz musician Idris Muhammad count among their more outré selections, and though it's not a breadth that can be ascribed to their production, it goes a long way to alleviating any suspicion that they've leapt onto the heaving, rickety 90s house bandwagon.

With the exception of the somewhat overstuffed piano house of Vision Of Love, the majority of the Bicep catalogue bears an impressive clarity of purpose, and much of it has some semblance of emotive range, too. From the aptly-titled New Jersey house tribute $tripper (apt because a second-hand copy on Discogs fetches upwards of £28, and it'll peel whatever's left of your nearest club's piss-poor paint job), to the sombre US garage skip of You (a song co-produced by fellow Northern Ireland native Ejeca, and released on Will Saul's excellent Aus label) and the faintly sinister, Twin Peaks-esque swirl of Echo Vibes, there's a degree of restraint at play that sets them apart from the raft of coked-up, cut-and-shut jobs rolling out from a production line staffed by dubstep chancers chopping R&B vocals with all the finesse of a drunken tugboat captain docking arse-first at Faslane.

Now running a label (on which Visions of Love was released, and is going for a not inexpensive sum on the second-hand market) alongside their blog, Ferguson and McBriar are set to close the year with a run of singles that have been as popular as they have been impressive. Whether or not they're spearheading some kind of Romero-style raising of the corpses of Strictly Rhythm, Dance Mania et al, you feel that the hack job will be left to someone else.