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Music reviews |
Four Tet - Rounds
Clever, melodic and hypnotic songs coaxed from the laptop of a U.K. 25-year-old.
Domino Records
Release date: 5/6/03
Rating: B+1. Hands 5:41
2. She Moves She 4:41
3. First Thing 1:13
4. My Angel Rocks Back and Forth 5:07
5. Spirit Fingers 3:22
6. Unspoken 9:31
7. Chia 0:32
8. As Serious as Your Life 4:48
9. And They All Look Broken Hearted 5:09
10. Slow Jam 5:18
It’s undeniably the product of a twenty-five-year-old guy noodling on his laptop computer, but Rounds is nowhere near as lame as that sounds. As Four Tet – the name he has given his solo side project – Kieran Hebden, guitarist of the British experimental-music group Fridge, has created something quite compelling with his third and best full-length album.
A moody, rarely boring collection of mostly downtempo instrumental tracks, the record combines electronic samples usually without sounding too synthesized, giving most songs an organic quality despite the drum machines and glitchy electronic sounds that pop up throughout. It's possible to refer to most tracks as "songs," which isn't always the case with laptop-wizards' products.
This works well, for the most part, as Hebden – clearly a devotee of free jazz – largely avoids the excesses or shortcomings of similar “ambient” or “electronica” artists. Four Tet is more complex than wallpaper-music makers like Lemon Jelly; more atmospheric than “chillout” bands like Groove Armada; more melodic than soundscape-makers like Boards of Canada; and less likely than Moby to serve as the soundtrack to car commercials.
Not that Rounds is perfect or even revolutionary – it has some boring and meandering moments – but it does a great job of negotiating between experimental and accessible, technological and sentimental. The opener, “Hands,” draws you in steadily with a recorded heartbeat, a gentle jumble of electronic chords, and finally a syncopated beat bringing some order to the cacophony. “She Moves She,” the jazz-influenced second track, centers on a hooky guitar motif accompanied by electronic sounds and beats that, while interesting for a while, suffers from being repeated too many times (a complaint that can be leveled at several songs).
“My Angel Rocks Back and Forth,” mainly a music-box-ish melody accompanied by an odd bit of percussion that sounds a bit like someone exhaling, is quite clever and rewards repeat listening, though it probably doesn’t need to be over five minutes long. “Spirit Fingers,” a rush of frenetic, high-pitched noises recalling string-instrument strumming, is the only song on the album that is so experimental that it becomes downright grating.
It is followed, though, by the high point of Rounds, “Unspoken,” a gorgeous combination of piano and slow rhythm so hypnotic you’ll never believe it’s nine and a half minutes long. Recalling DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” (from the 1996 classic Endtroducing), it’s easily the best piece of mood music anyone put out in 2003.
The excellent “As Serious As Your Life” and clever but somewhat challenging “And They All Look Broken Hearted” lead up to the album’s final song, “Slow Jam,” a warm wash of major chords and oddly fitting sound effects (like what sounds like a rubber ducky being squeezed) that combine for a song fit for playing over the credits of a movie with an incredibly happy ending.
Like a lot of similar artists, Rounds at first sounds like it could be innocuous background music – but (with a few exceptions) it’s so good that it’s rather hard to ignore. It’s remarkable that Hebden generated such a human-sounding work on a computer much like the one I’m using now to create this perpetually out-of-date website.
