Four Tet, Rounds (Domino) 10-
At only 25, Kieran Hebden is already practically a grizzled veteran. With five albums under his belt with Fridge, he’s toured with Radiohead and Super Furry Animals and remixed dozens of artists. With its third album, Four Tet has definitively eclipsed Fridge as Hebden’s primary creative endeavor. While the largely analog Fridge is often bogged down in self-conscious experimental post-rock formalism, Four Tet effortlessly transcends genre exercises, emanating the strange beauty of field recordings gathered by an alien Alan Lomax. Call it “organica” or “folktronica,” Four Tet infuses in its music the beautiful detritus of humanity lacking in the chilly lab experiments of many a music technologist. The first two Four Tet albums, Dialogue (1999) and Pause (2001) still had some recognizable inspirations – Alice Coltrane’s cosmic jazz, Can, Fennesz and even folk music. It’s obvious that Hebden paints from a vast musical palate, and, like Amon Tobin, he has finally managed to blend the brushstrokes into something entirely fresh and unique with Rounds.
It begins with the stunning, amorphous “Hands,” a microscopic journey from a beating heart through the brain, to the hands as your fellow travelers the blood cells hum, hemoglobin coos and plasma squishes. Its glowing melody never fails to inspire a rush of tingling warmth, like a fizzing aural mineral bath. It’s clear from the start that this music has so far outdistanced the creative dead-end of glitch techno and blip-hop that it’s like a forgotten bad dream. “Spirit Fingers” is the ghost of Orbital’s creative muse, made more brilliant as frenetically buzzing will o’ wisps.
As per the title, there are no edges, angles or ridges on Rounds. The music flows with suggestive curves, soft ovals and sumptuous loops. The feeling of floaty, suspended animation is somehow supplemented a sense of travel. The secret, which really should be no secret but the talent for it seems to be missing from far too many musicians, is the use of melody. From the sinister “She Move Me” to the delicate music-box chiming of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth,” the songs are infused with gorgeous, often stately tunefulness. The massively lyrical, nine-minute “Unspoken” rivals the best work of DJ Shadow peaking with a free jazz freakout that compliments rather than overpowers the sense of flow. Rhythm is not neglected here. Hebden is a well-schooled beat scientist, an equal to his hip hop heroes, marrying the spare, zen beats of DJ Krush with the frenzied sheets of percussion from free jazz. In “Unspoken” and “She Moves She,” the living pulses provide an anchor that prevent the celestial reveries from floating too far into space or subconsciousness, and “As Serious As Your Life” gets seriously funky.
“And They All Looked Broken Hearted” brings back some Eastern melodies that served well on the latter part of Dialogue, supplemented by some psychedelic backwards tape. “Slow Jams” is incidental music with an uplifting, rising scale, overheard vocal snippets and radio transmissions punctuated by the brilliant use of a squeak toy, demonstrating the power Pavlovian response of joy we feel via murky memories of early childhood and beloved pets.
Music this good is rarely rewarded on its own merits. Instead we see people discovering Nick Drake and Charles Mingus for the first time via car commercials. Do people deserve the pleasure of this music after stumbling upon it accidentally? No less than they deserve the warmth of the sun. If Four Tet gains a new audience via a commercial, good for him, better for us.
