On his much-acclaimed and generally over-regarded second Manitoba disc, Up in Flames, Canadian electro-boffin Dan Snaith chose to dramatically reinvent his geekish sound, from post-post-rock nice electro prettiness to multi-layered wall-of-sound bluster. The reason, he reckons, is that there's too much of this tasteful "folktronica" doing the rounds — or, as he drolly dubs it, "Lots of small labels in England have a host of little bedroom artists who all sound like they're ripping off Four Tet." Yet the guy behind Four Tet, Kieran Hebden of English genre-straddling electro/organic soundtrackists Fridge, hasn't felt the same need. Instead of running away from a sound type he's created, Hebden has chosen to stick to the same path. Rather than reinvention, he's plumped for the less-radical elective of getting better. His third Four Tet album, Rounds, finds Hebden mining the same vein of tasteful "folktronica," his work trying to create pastoral soundscapes through intricate programming. The obvious precursor to this work is Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol.II; but Hebden's approach is much more ad-hoc, his mixes more dense, making much use of acoustic instruments (piano, percussion, acoustic guitar); and there's less of the same authentic air of high-art classicism going down here. Sporting a "Bring It On" reference, for comedy's sake, "Spirit Fingers" flutters with shimmying tuned percussion and wrangled rapid-cut breaks standing in for waving digits. Sporting similar spirit, "She Moves Me" makes corralled glitches sound vivid once more, dropping them into a dense weave of niceness in a fashion that sounds subversive. In these, this is an obvious refining of the Four Tet sound, with Hebden forgetting the parroting of a bedroom army of wannabes, and only concerning himself with making good on his own brand of goodly goodness.
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