#575 Four Tet - Pink

Here Four Tet drops a lot of the angular strangeness that Rounds used to stir up indie circles in favor of repetitive, simmering house.

This is something of a singles collection, so the results are not wholly cohesive, but there's some common threads: every song is decidedly unnarative, not so much building as writhing in place, letting all of the angles reflect off eachother from every possible combination of angles and then fading into the distance.

The key then is the choice of samples and the ways they're woven. The best tracks find complementary tones that dance together in an appropriate atmosphere: Locked wields a jazz-rock warmth that somehow evokes Steely Dan and The Super Furry animals and a half dozen bands besides, while Peace for Earth, one of two new songs on this album, is the most successful at building something truly hypnotic. Hints of glitch are applied subtly, with little subbeat bups and pups, implied rhythmic skips, and vocal snippets that transcend voice and word to provide texture.

The problem with this much repetition is that just one sample out of place can ruin the groove and the flow and the song itself again and again and again. Lion is boring at best, and annoying every time its signature Cuica yelp imposes itself (which is often) and Pinnacles is seemingly built mostly out of sounds I don't much care to hear, whines and shakes and blunt wobbles.

There's generally something clumsy about this. Its adventurous, but clumsy; some of it works, some doesn't. Normally that'd be ok, but on an album like this where state of mind maintenance is the name of the game, you can't afford a lot of missteps 3/5