- After only ten minutes this long player sounds like the aural accompaniment to some space age love affair: whispered voices, disparate hooks, beautiful melodies. A little later on and your ears are transported to a small village in the Spanish mountains, mid-festival. You could easily call the contents herewith downbeat, though that would miss the point. There are beats. And the tempo is down. But it would be more apt to describe Back Home as an international soundtrack, equal parts experimental and traditionalist. One minute everything's going the way of Bjork working with Howie B and a bag of opium, the next we're sitting around a campfire, listening to Manu Chao.
Back Home succeeds because taking the journey from its dubbiest depths to the farthest Latin edges is so enjoyable. Albums labeled as eclectic or global can often suffer from over conceptualisation. Too often not enough thought has been afforded to accessibility. Not so here, as the notion of listening pleasure appears to have been paramount in the production process.
Take the oddly titled "Left My Girl for a Bizarre Sextet," which combines muted organs, intricate jazz pianos and Santana-style guitar solos, with a hallucinatory fairground waltz. It's not all challenging, though. Take a listen to the beautifully plucked strings that cascade over "Glassleaves." Complete with ethereal vocals, here given a touch of Coco Rosian shrill lunacy. Elsewhere, fans of Poltergeist and post-rave distorted vocals may find a lot to love in "When You Come Home." Inaudible, euphoria-tinged, distant and otherworldly lyrics carry across a soundscape of reversed cymbals and plodding pianos.
While airy-fairy atmospherics do feature heavily on most of the ten tracks, really that's only part of the story. There's plenty of late night partying, whiskey in hand, to be done to any of the tunes here. That said, it would be more appropriate if such sessions took place in an exotic, palm-lined locale, or perhaps at sea. Or... Well... In short, there are few words capable of accurately summarising this varied collection.
Tracklist01. Glassleaves
02. Day After Day
03. When You Come Home
04. The Better Man
05. All I Can Do
06. Fairy Tales
07. The K Blues
08. Sleepless And Mr Coffee
09. Without You
10. Left My Girl For A Bizarre Sextet