Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 24/04/06
Label: Domino

"We are not alone," goes the title track. This deceptively simple second album from Adem Ilhan (previously - with Sam Jeffers and Kieran Hebden - of Fridge) is obsessed with space - outer space, personal space and the issue of personal space when you're in outer space, like in one song where Adem is abandoned by his lover on a distant planet. Musically, too, it's about giving breathing space to unconventional (in a pop song) sounds like glockenspiel, thumb piano and clapping.

As a unifying concept it's superbly clever, allowing the London-based singer-songwriter to indulge in passages of both naval and moon-gazing - resulting in something enchanting, celestially lovely and as effective at lifting you out of yourself for forty-five minutes as an early evening cruise in a space shuttle. Listen with half an ear and the volume too low, however, and it initially washes over as so much organic singer-songwriterly musing - thankfully, under closer inspection, it's clear Ilhan's intentions are not to provide closing credits music for Brit rom-coms.

"Warning Call" sounds like a pagan moon-worshipping ceremony with a primal, tambourine / triangle / guitar beat that occasionally bursts into a nostalgic waltz, and the question "If we received a warning call / Would we change at all?" There's a "Planet Of The Apes"-style pay-off to this narrative that ought to win him some new fans at Friends Of The Earth. Human voice pulses and train track rhythms, as in "X Is For Kisses" and elsewhere, owe something to Steve Reich's "Different Trains".

The otherworldy "Last Transmission From The Lost Mission" and "Human Beings Gather Round" with their clangs, bells and other music-of-the-spheres sounds are modern, minimalist electronica pieces with echoes of both Mogwai and Japanese avant garde composer Takemitsu. If energy levels start to flag mid-disc - "Crashlander" doesn't go very far while "These Lights Are Meaningful" flies over wide-eyed Coldplay "Speed Of Sound" territory - it's because the tone and pace are uniformly whimsical and unhurried.

Luckily, final cut "Spirals" is a poetic masterpiece. Cramming the tiny (a pen drawing a spiral on the back of his hand) and the infinite (the Milky Way and Andromeda) into its lines, imagining parallels between the two galaxies (which astronomers claim will collide in three billion years) and his own relationship, and drawing the vocabulary of one space into the other ("galactic tectonic shifts in my chest") in a way that is very, very beautiful indeed. Please, now, can people stop calling Chris Martin a poet?

    by Anna Britten