Four Tet - 'Rounds' (Domino)
4/5
By: Toby L
Big periods of near-silence, entwining guitars, dashings of robotic, synthesized beats and swaths of liltingly sweeping keys and laptop-infused grooves; the hybrid between organic instrumentation and subtle electronica is Kieran Hebden's - aka Four Tet - greatest attribute.
It's this synergy that melds the joint between icy coolness - that such music from the genre too commonly provides itself - with glowing, resounding warmth that saturates the ensuing tones and sounds to a comforting, leisurely listen... A soundtrack to experience after a heavy day, or amidst quiet company, it's the sound of the city at night, condensed into an ideas-bustling 40 minutes that rank toweringly amongst Hebden's rich cannon of prior works.
A track-by-track synopsis would be but to overly segregate the collective piece, its individual vignettes instead stepping-stones to a bigger, collectively rounded picture. Cohesive indeed, this isn't a wall-to-wall series of 'club-bangers' (more stoner-fuel, if anything), so much as a full-bodied collateral of ease-your-mind bliss akin to the glow experienced when being indoors and it's pissing it down with rain outside. Or DJ Shadow with the lights out.
Peaking mid-way in the unobtrusively grandiose trots of a piano-infested 'Unspoken' - at nine and a half minutes, it's an official Epic © - seemingly, without a suffocating barrage of unwelcoming pretension, once again Kieran is shedding his excess creative-energies to ever-effective, palpably unique and dusted-down intrigue and stupefaction.
Artists in this article: Four Tet
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