Under their Boards of Canada alias, Scottish brothers Mike and Marcus Sandinson have become deities within the so called “intelligent” dance music scene. They offer aural equivalents of the imaginative potential a kid feels when presented with an empty card board box. Wrapped in artwork that mimics whole sale the covers on previous releases, their aching sense of wonder has once again been borne out across 15 tracks. You are struck by how amazingly minimal for the most part their sound actually is, its like something that’s been transmitted across tin-cans and string. Its become uplifting after the paranoid drones of tracks like “Gyroscope” on Geogaddi. On tracks like “Chromakey Dreamcoat” there’s a schizophrenic marriage of beats and acoustic guitar and a viola is meshed in on “Dayvan Cowboy”. The mid range is up and the bass is down with the eerie voice samples expunged from the mix.

It’ll take multiple sittings to figure this one out, at worst its music for yuppies to fuck to or the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at a cult mass suicide. At best it’s just a rehashing of something that was perfected on Twoism yonks ago, now served up with a few acoustic slices thrown into cover their asses and assure us that they’ve been doing something more than getting stoned and watching documentaries for the past three years. The phrase one trick pony has never been so apt.

Labels: Music