REVIEW: FOUR TET - PINK

Four Tet - Pink
Text, 2012

I figured I might as well join in the outpouring of love for Four Tet's new album, Pink (for examples, see the reviews here, here, and here, and the comments here). I don't know if I can call myself a long-time fan of Four Tet, but I've been pretty solidly on board since I first heard 2008's Ringer EP. "Ribbons" caught me in its spell--mysterious and alluring and weirdly beautiful; retrofuturistic in a strange way, like dusty chrome furniture in a space station. From there, I went backwards and caught up on what I'd missed. By the time 2010's There Is Love In You rolled around, it was fair to say that I was a fan. Over the past year and a half or so, it's been a pleasant surprise to have a steady trickle of music from Kieran Hebden, from collaborations with Burial to one-offs and pairs of tracks of new Four Tet songs. Those Four Tet songs are collected here, and it's a credit to the strength of Hebden's voice as a producer that Pink is a fairly unified set, exploring an area that, if not rigidly defined, at least has some pretty solid borders. If Pink doesn't quite match the heights of There Is Love In You, it's not for a lack of stunning moments, as throughout Hebden continues to demonstrate his ability to take what might seem affected in others' hands and turn out effortless, weightless music. The more overt turn for the dancefloor signaled by Ringer and followed through on his last album is front and centre, but there's also a nod towards his earlier work, with the sinuous, ever-shifting rhythms and cosmic outlook of free jazz, the gently psychedelic strains of 1960s folk and early 1970s singer-songwriter music, and the loose-limbed bop-and-knock of hip-hop shot through the floor-filling potential of the material here. Six albums into his career as Four Tet, Hebden's managed with Pink to sum up where he's been and hint at where else he might go. That both parts of that equation are thrilling suggests what a special talent Hebden is.

Pink is a lengthy album--it clocks in at just over an hour--but its length is put to good use: aside from a mid-album stretch of shorter tracks, extended run times provide Hebden with the room both to continually mutate the shape of tracks and to spotlight a track's parts. Thus, opener "Locked" allows its swinging percussion almost two full minutes to do all the lifting before it turns into infinitely refracted psychedelia, all shards of hallucinatory melody that subtly disorient even as they enchant. Similarly, closer "Pinnacles" pushes and pulls on its underwater, Caribou-esque techno centre, letting jauntily dissonant piano crash through the mix again and again, not to disrupt the groove but to highlight how swinging it is. Hebden is still able to pull back and isolate elements on the shorter tracks, though, as the drop into near-silence during the weirdly percolating break of "Jupiters" bridges its pretty overture with the jazzy and relentless groove that dominates its second half. Indeed, if there's a common denominator to the album, it's the importance of the drums to these tracks. Thrillingly alive--even when they clearly aren't live--they make the best argument for the evolution of Four Tet over the past decade, turning what's been an eclectic discography into a surprisingly linear trajectory. It's as if the collaborations with Steve Reid, the folktronica, the detours through house and techno had all been planned by Hebden, rather than happy accidents along the way as he developed. Regardless, it's all there in the drums, which, aside from the beatless epic "Peace For Earth" (probably the closest thing here to the material on There Is Love In You), cover the album like a web in much the same way those shimmering, Reich-ian pings and chimes covered the last album.

If the drums make the album, though, the stunning moments that I mentioned earlier come courtesy of the textures that interact with those drums. The chunky synths that close out "Locked" like a sunset. The kalimba/mbira that wends its way through the final three minutes of "Lion" and pushes the track's funkiness through the roof. The repetitive, old-school vocal sample that drives "128 Harps," and the heart-stopping pauses throughout the track, that inject some tension into what could otherwise be a bit of pretty filler. The chasing-its-tail vocal in "Pyramid" that allows the track to do "Love Cry" in reverse and offer the hardest, purest dance track of Hebden's career. These and other moments provide sumptuous highlights that move the body and fire the senses, suggesting that the music on Pink might best be called "gourmet techno." I've damned other albums for suffering from the dulling effects of great taste, but this is an example of undeniably great taste used to help the music rather than render it tame and predictable.

Despite the superlatives littering this and other reviews, it seems like it would be relatively easy to underrate Pink. Hebden's been so good for so long at this point that a new Four Tet album that does everything he's always done well and expands (or at least deepens) the project's aesthetic doesn't feel like a revelation. I doubt this album is going to be the starting point of any kind of revolution, and it's unlikely that Pink will be spoken of in the same hushed, reverential tones as his pal Burial's Untrue, say. What that doesn't and can't cover, though, is that this is well-written, well-produced music that hits all its targets in a relaxed, assured manner. Sometimes it pays to have a steady hand at the wheel, and it's difficult to imagine a steadier hand than Hebden's here.

On a deeper level there is one thing that Pink has going for it that suggests if it's not an "important" album, it's at least an interesting one: the tracks that make up Pink offer a model of how omnivorous music can avoid the over-caffeinated maximalism that tends to plague "post-everything" music, like Rustie's Glass Swords. At this point, Four Tet denotes an aesthetic sensibility that really does seem comfortable grabbing from just about anywhere, even if it mostly remains within certain genres and idioms. The pastoralism that first brought Four Tet notice is still present--if in limited supply on Pink; one of its wonders is how urban it feels--and the various elements at work in his sound are so integrated, so naturalised, that it's difficult to call anything he does a dalliance anymore. In this sense, Pink feels very timely: you could spend hours following its sounds and strands through YouTube, though that wouldn't necessarily make your experience of the album any richer. Knowledge of UK garage, 2-step, dubstep, house, and techno aren't required for entry--beauty and meaning are communicated on the surface as well as in the depths. In his study of literary modernism The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner compares the densely allusive poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot before concluding:

[N]o knowledge about Coriolanus will lock Eliot's lines neatly together as the information that Paquin was a Paris dressmaker will lock Pound's. Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand; but behind Eliot's resonance there is frequently nothing to restore (how centrifugal are the Notes to The Waste Land!). (133)

In place of omitting, we might say that Hebden synthesizes or integrates, but, like Pound, he can restore what he's integrated, allowing worlds to continually bloom behind his music. Here an allusion, a citation, and the (seemingly) infinite archive of the internet that supports and supplements the experience of listening to Four Tet offers a connection to a broader cultural matrix without ever feeling like it threatens to overwhelm the music in the present moment. That might not seem like it's much, but I'm finding that an increasingly scarce experience when listening to music these days. If musicians can learn any trick from Four Tet's Pink, I hope it's to do the same.

REVIEW: NATHAN FAKE - STEAM DAYS

Nathan Fake - Steam Days
Border Community, 2012

As "The People's List" is unveiled over the next three days, there are a number of albums I'll be looking to see where they place because they seem to function as barometers or signifiers of certain strains of indie-dom. Of those albums, Kid A is the one that I'm most interested to find out about, and not just because it's one of my favourite albums--along with Kid A, there's a whole constellation of albums and artists that defined a certain aesthetic, a certain sensibility, a certain sound that was, for awhile, the sound of the present and the future. Warp Records and 1990s IDM played a big role in shaping that sound. When it came out, discussions of Kid A seemed almost inevitably to be discussions of influence, as if the only important thing was determining from where Radiohead drew those sounds. Once the genealogy was straight, these discussions suggested, everything else would slot itself into place. That the process of tracing this genealogy in reviews and promos for the album let in a whole new spectrum of sounds and ideas about music than were normally covered by reviewers dedicated to slackers with guitars and math-rock bands was a happy accident. So, Kid A--via the fact that it led people who didn't normally (read: ever) talk about these things to mention electronic music, to list Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, and others, and to open a whole new world to listeners of a certain age and background--is and was momentous.

As recently as 2009, Pitchfork officially held Kid A to be the best album of the 2000s. This list makes for interesting reading still, as it at once confirms a pretty conservative bent (all of the albums one would expect to make that list are accounted for, most in exactly the places one would expect) and offers a glimpse at some bands whose stock doesn't seem to be riding quite as high today (Sigur Ros, the Strokes, and Modest Mouse all in the top ten seems like a stretch for "The People's List," but I could be wrong). I believe there's a good chance that "The People's List" will be the final enshrinement of a certain canon of indie music, an entrenchment of an orthodoxy that just might be one of the last stabs at importance as a criterion for evaluation. What I'm not sure of is to what degree the orthodoxy that sprung up around Kid A (and there were certainly people into the things influencing Radiohead long before Kid A was released, but I do think that a band of Radiohead's size and of its position in the indie rock landscape so publicly displaying these musicians' influence on them had a crystallizing effect) will remain the orthodoxy. Back in 2005, Nitsuh Abebe wrote of a world in which "indie kids no longer bulk up their mix-tape credibility with some Autechre or Squarepusher on side two, and the new daydream alternative to rock attitude comes mostly from German electronics." That last clause now seems almost painfully of its time--I can't remember how long it's been since German electronics seemed the choice of indie kids, and given the post-everything maximalism and omnivorous listening habits of today's milieu, it might not even be possible to name any one thing that could be that choice today.

Nathan Fake's Steam Days is a pretty fascinating album to listen to in light of all this, as it seems to speak to a time when there was a specific choice for indie kids, a time that has largely passed. I first became interested in Fake's music when Jess Harvell described his work as "plastic techno My Bloody Valentine homages" in a review of the deluxe reissue of Seefeel's Quique. I've checked out a few of his releases since then, though nothing has really caught my ear in the way that that description caught my imagination. I'd be lying if I said that Steam Days was really much different: for all that Fact might describe the album as his "most dynamic album-length work to date," much of it feels same-y and undistinguished as the songs mostly do the same thing over and over again. What hurts most is the fact that Fake's music seems to be mining territory that others have already covered to such dazzling ends. Opener "Paean," for example, feels straight off the Richard D. James Album, its melody and structure somewhere between "Cornish Acid" and "Cornmouth." Unfortunately, while it's accomplished enough, the melody lacks staying power and the combination of playfulness and slight surreality that lifts James' best work. Regrettably, this same problem crops up over and over again; Fake is a gifted producer--nothing here sounds out of place--but nothing feels particularly necessary, either. By the time "Neketona" arrives, it's hard not to start wondering how many times you've already heard this track.

The limited palette on display in the first half doesn't help matters. The vinegar-y backing to "Iceni Strings" feels like it might be intriguing at first, but it's not abrasive enough to really set off the track's melody (nor is it really that different from what's appeared on the first two tracks). The titular strings are nicely soaring, though I wish they had more to do besides repeat a pretty but otherwise nondescript part. Similarly, the hollow, brittle drums that underpin most of the album's songs feel stuck in some turn-of-the-millennium hinterland in which they're doomed to perpetual good taste: nothing really rages, and even syncopations are relaxed and obvious. It's disturbingly close to coffee shop soundtrack territory, in this regard. What urgency is present on the album is often the result of straight 4/4 hi-hats or snares that become tiresome long before they have the chance to become transcendent, as on "Harnser." 

In contrast, "Old Light" is one of the best things here, as a beat with a slyly funk hitch in its step is accompanied by a distant melody that strikes the right balance between melancholy and mawkish and in so doing manages to be evocative without being sentimental. There's a deftness in its construction that just underlines how much more I wish some of these songs did. The second half of the album seems to pick up on these qualities and is altogether more promising. "World of Spectrum" is intriguingly aggressive, not a million miles removed from the sounds and textures on display on Squarepusher's Ufabulum. Especially against the too-polite backdrop of the majority of the album, its slightly harsher approach is a welcome intrusion and a chance to get the blood pumping. "Rue" is another highlight: its droning chords are genuinely affecting as it pulls off a similar trick to CFCF's "Exercise 4 (Spirit)" or the backing to Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack." The primary-colour melody of "Sad Vember" isn't quite as striking as that of "Old Light," though it is quite nice, but its final minute of hissy, tuneless, pitch-damaged synths feels indulgent and unearned.

The album closes with its two longest tracks: "Glow Hole" and "Warble Epics." The former clocks in at just a shade under eight minutes and moves from ring modulated textures to more mid- to late-90s Warp nods before returning to those ring modulated sounds in its bridge. The melody creeps back in and the drums get a little heavier, but as a whole, the track isn't really dynamic enough to make use of its slightly lengthier run time--its valleys don't feel like valleys and its peaks are too choreographed and inevitable to be genuinely exciting. "Warble Epics" opens with some nicely mock-portentous synths in a much appreciated moment of levity before rigidly 4/4 hi-hats take over. The drums are very upfront and dominate the mix a little, which is a shame because they're not as interesting as some of Fake's other bits of programming. The melody has some intriguing twists to it, and when it finally comes more to the fore a little under halfway through the track it's a welcome development. There's nothing radically different or unique about "Warble Epics"--it sums up what Steam Days is about fairly well, and is one of the more solid tracks on the album. The coda to the track might be the best part, though, a bit of nicely suggestive music that hovers in the distance like heat over a hump in the road.    

I can imagine being impressed by this album if I'd discovered it at 14 when I was reading all about Kid A and its influences. What I can't imagine, though, is being captivated by it in a way that the classics of those Warp Superstars of old captivated me when I heard them for the first time. It's not that Fake is doing anything wrong--largely, he's doing everything right. The problem is that he's doing the right things because they're the obvious, established things to do. The album desperately needs a challenge, an angle to work that would elevate these tracks from filler to attention grabbers. As it is, too much of the album goes by without making an impression or offering a way to differentiate one track from another. What's most disappointing about the album, ultimately, is that its building blocks have already been cannibalised and assimilated by other other genres to fresher, more interesting ends. It feels timeless in the wrong sense: Steam Days doesn't transcend its moment and stand as an immortal work, but rather feels equally unmoored from the present and the past that inspires it, without a place to exist and in which one could interact with it.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #3 BNJMN BLACK SQUARE

Albums of the Year 2011: #3

BNJMN - Black Square

I have to admit that, ignoring the cliches about books and covers (because this is an album, not a book, damn it!), I first picked up BNJMN's second album of 2011, Black Square, because of its cover. It reminded me of Lorn's very good album Nothing Else,* which is not a bad comparison. Both albums offer a kind of stripped down take on their respective electronic music genres (roughly, house for BNJMN and techno for Lorn) that does nothing to disguise the constituent elements of the tracks or the process of their composition. Indeed, few of BNJMN's tracks can be said to have a narrative or much in the way of development, at least in terms of progression from one point to another. What Black Square excels at is to introduce a theme or groove and then simply add and subtract elements from the song. This sounds simple and a recipe for boredom, but it's not: Black Square succeeds because of the excellent pacing of those additions and subtractions and the way that they subvert what at first seems like the linear trajectory of the track. This is not music that has an intro just to build up anticipation for the beat to drop; quite often, when the beat does drop, the other elements of the track refuse to give way for it, continually disrupting its attempts to impose a kind of strict tempo or pulse on the track. His approach is perhaps most obvious on "Open the Floodgates," the album's most direct nod to house, in which the chopped and shuddering music continues to push to the foreground, overwhelming the most club-ready beat on the album. Halfway though, the whole track enters a hall of mirrors with lasers zipping everywhere and the beat rushes in to save the day, only to be overwhelmed once more. Basic kick drum patterns often run underneath the tracks as anchors, but this is far from the asceticism of mnml: the percussion often swings and syncopates merrily along. 

None of this is done in a self-indulgent or show-off-y way, though. What's most impressive about Black Square is the ease and confidence that permeates the music. Aside from the two pretty-sounding but forgettable short tracks ("Enterlude" and "River Way," whose pitched down twinkles are a wonder), these are songs that impress with their purpose. Not a single element feels out of place or enters or exits at the wrong time (a matter of vital importance on an album like Black Square). BNJMN tips his hand early on, as "Primal Pathways" and "Wisdom of Uncertainty" lay out the basic template of everything that's to follow: the former's gorgeous synth strings demonstrate the melodic territory the album is going to cover, and the latter provides an easy to follow primer on BNJMN's compositional methods, adding and subtracting elements before a minimal bleeps-and-percussion outro cools things down. The title track covers some of the same ground as SBTRKT, all sleek, stylish, and sexy night moves with some nice hand percussion layered in the mix that really enhances the groove. The album's final two full songs, discounting "River Way," are the best here, though. "Lava" takes the foundation of "Wisdom of Uncertainty" and explodes its aesthetic possibilities, connecting a long build up of elements added to the track one-by-one to a fantastic melody (the flanged strings that creep around the edges are heavenly, and the Morse code keys to open the track wouldn't sound out of place on a Stereolab album). Slowly, everything is pulled away, leaving just a first pieces of the song; the final thirty seconds of the track might be my favourite part of the album. As good as "Lava" is, though, "Hallowed Road" does it one better. Aided by a truly excellent bassline, "Hallowed Road's" mournful tune feels like the final transmission of a dying space station. There's something vaguely worrying or threatening about the melody and atmosphere, but BNJMN wisely keeps this from developing into full-blown menace. In a list full of albums with great closing tracks, "Hallowed Road" might be my favourite closing track of the year, which is saying something. I wasn't enamoured by BNJMN's first album of 2011, Plastic World, but Black Square really made an impact with me. Its confidence and compositional nous suggest that BNJMN has a bright future, and I eagerly await his next offering.

*Speaking of Nothing Else, I have to say that I think it does the same things that people are lauding Kuedo's Severant for, only it does them more effectively and with a better set of tunes to boot.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #6 SURGEON BREAKING THE FRAME

Albums of the Year 2011: #6

Surgeon - Breaking the Frame

Another album, another fantastic album cover (I swear I'm not picking these just because I like looking at their covers). If you'd told me at the start of the year that an album like Breaking the Frame would place this high on my year-end list, I'd have assumed you were joking. What draws me into this album? There's some truly great drum programming (I love that panning, skittering beat on "Remover of Darkness"), but there's also a very impressive sense of movement and development over the course of the tracks ("Presence" feels like Four Tet's "Ribbons" pulled inside out). So much of the album seem tied to some kind of birth of the universe narrative and, to a certain extent, it is quite easy to hear this music as bursts of radiation from stars or the remnants of the big bang. The melody in "Transparent Radiation," for example, seems like it's flickering before my eyes on a spectroscope, a tightly controlled blast of colours from up and down the scale. Indeed, tracks like "Dark Matter" and "Radiance" manage to give form and shape to intangible images in much the same way that the title of Tim Hecker's Harmony in Ultraviolet seems perfectly descriptive of the music found therein. Indeed, the opening of "Radiance"--and the middle section with its long climb through detuned swells of synths--is like a musical illustration of a star blowing out and throwing off its layers.

Unlike Black Sun, though, scarred and pitted with its images of decay and apocalypse, Breaking the Frame is (coldly) elegant, like a thirtieth-century court ball. Given the extremely tight control on display in this music (Surgeon's moniker is apt--everything here is razor sharp and incredibly precise), it's initially quite hard to reconcile the music with the title of the album. Listening to Breaking the Frame, I often get a sense of holographic grids and graphs flying around before my eyes, describing a universe of equations, of pure information (this is the same feeling I get when listening to something like A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology). What could possibly break this frame? The answer that gradually emerges, and what really makes this album something special, is twofold: the human presence that creeps in from time to time and the sheer scope of the cosmic grandeur described above.* The chopped and stuttering melody on "Presence" feels like it has a single balalaika player hidden in it somewhere.  When the steady kick drum of "Those Who Do Not" drops after the chilling tones of "We Are All Already Here" (a track that also brings to mind radiation), it's a reminder that, for all of its abstraction, this is an album made by a DJ, and the dancefloor beckons even in the midst of cosmic meditations. Similarly, the waves of crowd chatter that punctuate the start of "Not-Two" are a brilliant disruption in what had threatened to be a cold, sterile universe, and, if it's not miles away from the opening "Dark Matter," it's a fittingly celestial send off. Picture it as humanity's contribution to the background noise of the universe; it's lovely that way. 

*The same applies to Black Secret Technology, actually, although on that album it's the presence of those diva vocals and, uh, Finley Quaye.