Kieran Hebden And Steve Reid - Tongues
[Domino]

Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid have really come up tops with their third album Tongues, after last year's pair of twin improvised records, The Exchange Sessions. Tongues ditches the sprawling, over-long and sometimes sketchy tracks they first employed, for a flirtation at making an experimental pop record, where percussive-heavy jazz and electronics sit side-by-side in unison, forming something quite brilliant.

With the Exchange Sessions, the tracks were focused mainly around the loose spur-of-the-moment jazz-flavoured drumming of Steve Reid, with the occasional samples, drones and sound effect accompaniments from Hebden. However, for an artist who has produced such great albums as Pause, Rounds and Everything Ecstatic under his alias of Four Tet, as well as remixing every name under the sun, Hebden's place on the previous material seemed unfocused and lacking his full potential.

Thankfully then, Tongues is the finished product this ideal pairing have been threatening to make from their mind-blowing live shows and past studio time. With so many ideas and so many different genres and sounds flying around, the results should be an uncohesive jumbled mess.

On the other hand this mass of inventiveness works brilliantly, with the pair conuring up a dense soup of sounds, where layers of percussion and built-up drum layers are greeted with synths, bass, sonically-charged electronics and even the wind-chimes that have become a staple of Hebden's earlier Four Tet work make an appearance. Strong melodies sift through the rich tapestry of instrumentation and from this careless genre-swopping, the pair truly know no bounds.

Tongues Track Listing:

01. The Sun Never Sets
02. Brain
03. Our Time
04. People Be Happy
05. Greensleeves
06. Rhythm Dance
07. Mirrors
08. The Squid
09. Superheros
10. Left Handed, Left Minded