Shamir Bailey's voice sounds like freedom. That's all illusion and artifice, of course. No one person can stand in as an avatar for that sort of feeling. Bailey is a human, like the rest of us, and he's had to deal with the hardships of growing up as an androgynous black man in the burnt-earth suburbs north of Las Vegas, which cannot be an easy thing for anyone. The euphoric dance-pop of Bailey's debut album Ratchet might not even be the music he wants to be making. He's said in plenty of interviews that he started out trying to make country music, and I have no idea that he'll get around to it eventually. (When Bailey does sing country, it's devastating.) But Shamir's voice has some of that swooping, diving, lighter-than-air feeling that you can hear in something like Michael Jackson's Off The Wall. For my money, Off The Wall remains the best MJ album because it's the one with a sense of discovery to it; you can practically sense Jackson walking into a club for the first time and his soul just taking flight. And that's what I hear in Ratchet: An incredible voice learning what it can do, taking off into the stratosphere. If you swapped Bailey out for a relatively average singer, Ratchet would still be an album of expertly assembled disco-house and synthpop. But coming from a vocalist as rare and special as Bailey, it's something else: A monument to dizzy joy and a testament to human possibility. It's probably conceivable to keep a bad mood going when Ratchet is on, but I haven't succeeded yet.