Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/10/05
Label: Warp

The very word - part "electrician", part "alchemist" - suggests a combination of applied technical expertise and near magical conjuring with metaphysical elements, when in fact, anyone who owns a laptop and a sequencer and knows how to break a beat can cast themselves as an "electronicist".

It's perhaps for this reason that Scottish brothers Marcus and Mike Sandison refrain from doing so. "We're not an IDM band and not an electronic band", Mike said recently, "we're just a band." That despite the fact that, as the near reclusive Boards Of Canada, they've been recording spectral and downbeat, experimental yet emotionally engaging ambient techno for almost a decade now, marking out a territory shared by the likes of Global Communication and Kruder & Dorfmeister.

As its title suggests, their fourth album for Warp has something of an organic glow about it, with (live, treated) guitars figuring heavily for the very first time and the tracks assuming more melodic, conventionally structured song form. The pair have opted for unfiltered analogue over cleaned-up digital, too, achieving a lush density with loops and textures and a warm wooziness overall that's a million miles removed from their last effort, 2002's dark and almost mathematically complex "Geogaddi".

The brothers readily admit a love of My Bloody Valentine and the seductive vortices of both their "Loveless" and Seefeel's "Quique" exercise a pull here, but it's a case of creative empathy, not obvious influence. There's barely a sound that hasn't been morphed in some way and, to further muddy the genre waters, use of hip hop beats and fractured found sounds aligns the duo just as happily with cLOUDDEAD, the sweet resonance of plucked acoustic guitar strings with Joni Mitchell, a way-gone trippiness with early Pink Floyd.

To pick highlights of "The Campfire Headphase" makes little sense; it's best appreciated as a set piece allowed to ebb and flow around the listener, but certain tracks are particularly lush: the perfectly titled "Chromakey Dreamcoat"; "Dayvan Cowboy", which quivers like a flock of birds turning mid-flight; the glazed and giddy "Hey Saturday Sun"; and closer "Farewell Fire", with its ecclesiastical, strangely hesitant grandeur.

Both a provider of comfort from our cruelly isolating, tech-obsessed world and a result of that same world's highly mechanised means of production, "The Campfire Headphase" manages to have its cake and eat it, too. Sweet.

    by Sharon O'Connell