Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 23/4/07
Label: Anticon

Often, the label to which an artist is signed tells you very little about them, except perhaps that, fed up with having obscurity thrust upon them and been cast out in the fiscal desert for too long, said artist took a deep breath, smelled the cheque and went for it. Sometimes - and this is necessarily true more of an independent label - it tells you a great deal. Cue San Francisco trio Thee More Shallows, whose latest album bears not the name of Monotreme, who released their first two efforts, but the hip Anticon logo.

As any left-field hip hopper worth his backpack knows, this is home to the Oakland-based collective of the same name, which includes the feted cLOUDDEAD trio and a series of endlessly cross-collaborative, similarly minded sonic adventurers - Themselves, Alias, Passage, Subtle, Restiform Bodies…the list goes on. Anticon signifies a particular disregard for parameters - in particular, those generally thought to apply to hip hop and it's clearly this that drew band and label together. That and the fact that one day TMS's singer-songwriter Dee Kesler discovered the guy living behind his house was none other than cLOUDDEAD's Odd Nosdam.

Responsible for a goodly number of its broken beat patterns, he's an entirely empathetic presence on the cheekily named "Book Of Bad Breaks", but the hand on the TMS tiller is very much their own. A skeletal framework built from double-time drum work and featuring thrumming drones and fizzing electronic ambience replaces the rumbling mesh of post rock, pastoral psych pop and contemporary classical with flues of white noise that was previous album, "More Deep Cuts", but without compromising TMS's perfect balance of twisted atmospherics and freaky, free-flowing pop.

At times, as on "Eagle Rock", TMS run close to Mercury Rev circa "Boces". At others ("The Dutch Fist") they borrow both Kraftwerk's motorik grooves and Grandaddy's smudged alt.pop, dip into the kind of ambient metal lately favoured by Mike Patton (as on "Proud Turkeys"), channel the spirit of "Low"-era Bowie (with the terrific "Chrome Caps") or (via the moody "Mo Deeper") reprise Joy Division's "Isolation". Kesler's sweetly cracked, lilting vocal tone keeps it all together, as does the glue of textured, electronic atmospherics and the three, neatly segued interludes featuring treated violin and French horn.

Thee More Shallows' pop fans might yearn for more mellifluous melodies - their hip hop heads for more doctored beats - but in this "Book Of Bad Breaks", they're clearly on the same page.

    by Sharon O'Connell