Four Tet - Rounds
(Domino)
Kieran Hebden's third solo album, Rounds, proves his brand of electronica is not one for the clubs at midnight nor for the after-after hours at three. His music is for quiet Thursday afternoons after you get home for work and for sunny Saturday mornings when you've got nothing to do. It's purely enjoyable music that is ideal for simply staying happy and relaxed.
The title, Rounds, refers to singing rounds in a bar-hall, so naturally it is built on repetition and warm sounds. The beats Hebden uses are never harsh; they are the spring shower to other electronic artists' hurricanes. Much like in Hebden's band, Fridge, each song here is built from two or three key instruments or samples, and then assembled.
As such, many of the songs on Rounds have a pure, minimal sound. "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth" uses only beats, string samples, and a music-box-like keyboard melody to create a mesmerizing and soothing five minute drone. "Spirit Fingers" is mainly built from from only two keyboard parts—one sped-up really fast and cut up, and the other played at a normal speed—but the sound it creates is very warm and soothing as the rapid fluctuation of tones creates a thick, full sound.
Several songs are decidedly less minimal though. The ten minute "Unspoken" is a DJ Shadow-esque cavalcade of sounds tied together by the same step-show-like beat. The song starts off simply enough with just a looped piano sample, however the song eventually unfolds, incorporating a saxophone part and several layers of keyboards.
Album opening "Hands" is also dense with sound, using several layers of keyboards with a frenzied beat. In fact, this sounds like an application of those bar-hall rounds to a set of samples, as the keyboard samples seem to start over each other before the previous clip has ended, creating a very trancy and enveloping wall of sound.
As Pause, Four Tet's previous album, did not have the impact on me that Fridge's stellar Happiness did, it came to me as a surprise that I liked Rounds so much. Perhaps it's because the music is less pop and more pure, minimal, low-key, and irresistable.
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