Four Tet

Four Tet wizard Kieran Hebden specializes in glitchy laptop collages that draw on
everything from hip-hop to gamelan ensembles. On his fourth album, Hebden's lovingly
arranged pet sounds cohere nicely when he jacks up his trip-hop-y beats.

Kieran Hebden does pack a lot of ideas, or maybe they're really just sounds, into a song, or maybe the term is album cut. But he's always lyrical. There's never that Conlon-Nancarrow-meets-Squarepusher sense of machine-scale speed exploited to evoke the workings of a mind that should take it easy already. Rounds was so lyrical, in fact, that it drove genre obsessives to the neologism "folktronica." Many such folks are disquieted by Hebden's constitutionally protected decision to dabble in the usages of drum'n'bass, which are every laptopper's roots, after all. The drums get busy at times, but never fear--this sounds more like Rounds than it does like anything else. Just a little funkier. (Grade: A-)