Review by Yorgo Douramacos: With his latest release, British electronica icon Kieren Hebden rounds out an impressive decade of material with a stunner of a record. There Is Love In You is Hebden's first official album as Four Tet since 2006’s quirky and divisive Everything Ecstatic, though he's hardly stayed idle since. The last ten years have seen this elusive maestro of the mixing board create a genre (“folk-tronica”), openly reject said genre (as evidenced on Everything Ecstatic), churn out countless remixes of varying degrees of quality (two to seek out: his redressing of Explosion in the Sky’s “Catastrophe and the Cure” and his take on Thom Yorke’s “Atom’s for Peace”), and maintain a long-term partnership with avant-garde drummer Steve Reid. That partnership alone produced four albums; and yet, somewhere in there, Hebden managed to release a handful of EPs and stray tracks under his Four Tet moniker, while also holding down various DJ gigs across the globe. One of those gigs became the inspiration for this record, arguably his greatest accomplishment to date. As the story goes, Hebden's mind was on the sweaty, heaving bodies and lazer-lit fog of London’s Plastic People Club when he conceived There is Love in You. And the resulting record has a distinctly techno flavor, leaning toward some of the richer, chilled-out moments of Aphex Twin rather than the more typical, synth-and-acoustic formula Four Tet fans will be used to. Nevertheless, Hebden retains his signature preference for sampling, as well as the organic and jazzy style that sounds just as striking as it did on his debut, Pause, and its follow-up, Rounds. There is Love's opening track alone, “Angel Echoes,” quickly becomes one of the most rapturously beautiful pieces Hebden's crafted to date, centering on a Burial-esque soul sample. However, it’s the album’s penultimate track, “Plastic People,” which perhaps best represents the progress Four Tet has made over the last half-decade, integrating shambolic jazz rhythms with a glassy melody and layer after layer of samples. It’s in moments like this, scattered graciously throughout is Love in You, that Hebden confirms his status as one of the most innovative artists working the modern experimental music scene today. And his willingness to experiment in order to find exactly the right texture he's looking for remains both his greatest asset and his greatest gift to us.
Last Word: Kieren Hebden’s first official album as Four Tet in several years reconfirms his status as one of the most innovative artists working the modern experimental music scene today.
Review By:
Yorgo Douramacos
IN REVIEW ONLINE
