*** Todd Terry

TODD TERRY PRESENTS READY FOR A NEW DAY

(LOGIC)

For as long as master DJ Todd Terry's new CD sticks to deeply righteous house rhythms topped off by the soul shouts of singers soaring and tumbling, it certainly does pump the feeling. No one's house music feels blacker than Terry's woofer-destroying bottom notes, and "I'm Feeling It" -- a maelstrom of walking-bass and tunnel-like echo scratch -- scarifies the music in classic Terry style.

His remixes of Everything But the Girl's "Missing" and "Wrong" showed that he also knows how to present the surging vocals of divas and soul men. Here, Martha Wash and Jocelyn Brown touch the ceiling in "Something's Goin' On (In Your Soul)" and a remake of 1978's "Keep On Jumpin'." Wash returns solo to dominate the light and garagy "Ready for a New Day" and "Free Yourself." Likewise, Bernard Fowler howls a funky path through "Satisfaction Guaranteed." The CD's best vocal, though, belongs to Shannon -- the voice of 1983's "Let the Music Play" -- as she recaptures, in "It's Over Love," all the searching for an answer that made her big hit a major moment in the history of rhythmic riddles.

Unhappily these Terry triumphs are compromised by ventures into the ice world of electronic scratch, a genre that freezes the life out of his warm-bodied gospel style. The Chemical Brothers he isn't.

-- Michael Freedberg