Album Review: Four Tet "There is Love in You"

If I had heard this album, not knowing who made it, and someone asked me afterward who I thought it might be, Four Tet might not have been on my short list. When Rounds and Everything Ecstatic came out in ‘03 and ‘05 respectively - and a few months before “Everything is Alright” became synonymous with NPR’s On Point - I was really into Four Tet.

The music blew mind in a way in which most electronic music hadn’t in a few years. Kieran Hebden’s percussion sequencing was crazy, seemingly always changing and wrapped up with beautifully textured synth beeps, whines and squelches. It was old and new – a continuation of the natural lineage of electronic and jazz styles, but with a significant ‘awesoming’.

Most of those elements are still present in this new record, but they seem to relate to one another differently. On “Love Cry” it’s that there is a distinctly clubbier feel to the track – an increased reliance on plaintive looped vocal cries and a steadier back beat. I bet you could mix it well with something off LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver if you were so inclined – plus it would help move past the intro, which runs too long.

The fifth track, “Sing”, is a left-field house anthem - but can get monotonous if you don’t have a way to occupy yourself while listening. It would probably be nice to paint to. In fact, this album scores much higher if you use it along with immersive activities like painting, drawing or playing video games that take place in the future or underwater (or both).

Maybe time has distorted my memory – after all, before double checking, I wouldn’t have thought it had been 5 years since I’d bought Everything Ecstatic – but I wouldn’t have described Four Tet as resembling either electronic-post-post-punk or left field house anthem.

I’m not trying to say an artist can’t try new things, I’m just always surprised when an artist who I thought of as being reasonably edgy takes a turn back toward the center, which is what some of these tracks feels like.

The other possibility, of course,  is that the center has moved farther out to greet him, which is certainly true in part. Recently Ratatat and others have shifted the studious musician and listener farther into what used to be the sole turf of experimental electronic music.

“This Unfolds”, a more traditional downtempo tune, could be shortened by a couple of minutes into a better song. It is one of the times through the course of the record that my patience is exercised beyond its comfort zone. I don’t know if it’s a sign that, like so many of my generation, my attention span has been depleted by advertising and video games, or whether the album just moves too slowly at times.

"Circling" feels like background music to an early-80s, Public Television program about astronomy. If there were an old man with a beard and thick frame glasses talking about pulsars or something while Hubble images drifted in front of me, then it might not get so repetitive.

If you are looking to put something on that you will walk away from and come back to; or zone out to while staring at something like a black light poster, then by all means, this is choice material. If you're scared of time warps and lapses, then you'll want to stay away.

I'm pretty sure that people are going to disagree with me about this review. I have a sneaking suspicion that this album will be a critical success (I don't know because I don't like to read about an album before I review it: It changes how I listen - Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, etc).

In closing, I would note that There is Love in You has a let less hope than previous records (ps. I never heard Ringer so I’m only talking about Rounds and Everything Ecstatic). There's a much more palpable sense of anxiety behind this record. Missing are tracks like “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth” or “Smile Around the Face”. Where Rounds was energetic, There is Love in You feels anxious and drawn out. The title is a forced reminder more often than a shared emotion.