Boards of Canada • All Reason Departs
First Impressions at 1420 MHz.
Listened to at night, in the mountains with the full moon and my trusted musical/post-punk sidekick. A different album, noble and commendable to me, they’re still themselves (with subliminal, highly measured references to their own past songs and musical solutions), yet they’ve moved forward and I really like that they included all these live instruments, at times it’s one of their most moving works, almost like NIИ’s The Fragile in certain moments, but without the violence of industrial, a track like Father & Son makes Massive Attack seem not urban, but astral. They’ve been able to cut through a speech, metricize it into a hip-hop flow and create a sort of robotic rap, these guys are absolute, unique geniuses, they sound so deeply human they make you sink into the primordial soup. A dark album, true to themselves, they don’t deceive the fans. A supreme album, one that asks for and deserves attention. The only track that doesn’t excite me at the moment is Into the Magic Land, but I’m sure that in the future I’ll appreciate it as a fragment of the complete puzzle. The tracks that captivated me the most: Hidrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan, The Word Becomes Flesh, in Naraka the mantra could have been unbearably tacky, but on the second listen it already fit perfectly, beautiful and phantasmagoric music; in You Retreat In Time And Space I feel like I perceive the ghost of Badalamenti from Twin Peaks, All Reason Departs, they made me see beyond Platonia.
Over & Out. Deep Time, Warp Music.