Everything Ecstatic - Four Tet

Everything Ecstatic

Four Tet
Domino Records.

SCQ Rating: 71%

Don’t mention the term 'folktronica' around Kieran Hebden; it’s perhaps the one word that could make the polite Brit turn his back on you. It’s bad enough to have a made-up, ridiculous genre like folktronica following your career but in Hebden’s case, where he’s been credited with creating it, there’s an imminent breaking point. Luckily for us Four Tet fans, that breaking point is an album called Everything Ecstatic – a shape-shifting dance record that channels warped Boards of Canada tones as often as chaotic, afro-beat rhythms. So if you’re among those fans that think Four Tet’s previous work resembled folk, this might as well resemble drum n bass.

If the raw vibrating bass line that assumes all melodic duties of ‘A Joy’ isn’t jarring enough for fans of the elegant Rounds, check out ‘Smile Around the Face’ – a pop song, Four Tet-style, featuring simple digital percussion and chipmunk-pitched vocals. Truthfully, the song starts out on generic ground but by the three minute mark, Hebden has brought all the whirs, clicks and keyboards together to transform a predictable hip-hop dynamic into a lush dreamscape. The most emblematic track on Everything Ecstatic has to be ‘Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions’, a painstaking effort that proves how capable of a producer Four Tet has become. Layers upon layers of scratches, whistles, field recordings and beats sum up its seven and a half minutes of bedlam, like a distillation of the record at large. No doubt, the drum patterns on display are among the most sophisticated and flashy I’ve ever heard, but bombast aside, it’s difficult to ignore that Four Tet, a man of countless talents, is playing the same hand over and over.

Everything Ecstatic is a welcome excursion, mostly because Hebden has too much creativity to simply roll out Rounds 2.0. Even when he lowers his drum-programming guard, there are elements of his earlier pastoral side; the melodic circles of ‘High Fives’ or ‘You Were There With Me’s tender close. These whispers of his ‘folktronic’ past might sound buried in other influences, but they’ve really transformed into something far more primeval, unpredictable, and occasionally, tedious.