Anyone who thought that breathy Canadian James Teej might have run out of air following his Morning Harvest album released earlier this year is sorely mistaken. His unmistakable vocal greets us indifferently from the very first bars of opener "Anything Right"—a slow-pitched, ominous song from which you can (un)comfortably extract a little of Teej's troubled soul. Despite the black lyrics and creepy atmosphere, it's not an unhappy track and could almost be called uplifting.
For "Don't Appear" he ditches his own voice for a spacey female vocal, intermittently layering it over phazing stabs of percussion, big, sweeping chords and a lazy bassline that throbs though the middle of everything. There's also a nice touch of humour in the off-key developments of the chords, suggesting that Teej isn't quite the miserablist minimalist he might otherwise be assumed to be. Finally, "Three Light Years to Come" is a ten-minute bounding Detroit techno epic, I guess because sometimes it's nice to stop thinking about assigning emotions to MIDI signals and just have a dance.
Tracklist: James Teej - Fundamental
01. Anything Right
02. Don't Appear
03. Three Light Years to Come
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