OK punk, we can do this the easy way or the hard way or the easy way.
The easy way: you need this album like life needs mind-blowing experiences. Like you need fantastic sex and warm all-encompassing love.
Oh, but you want to do this the hard way do ya? Well, if you must...
The Cinematic Orchestra emerged in 1999, slap bang in the middle of what the opposite end of the dance music spectrum was calling the summer of trance.
Their plan went like this: take one studio genius with a vision, J. Swinscoe, and leave him in the room with four amazing jazz musicians. Add high tech recording equipment and an ear for fresh beats: the result is the Cinematic Orchestra.
Much fuss was made of '99's debut LP 'Motion', not least because of it's strong single 'Channel 1 Suite'.
But to these ears it was the 'Remixes 1998-2000' album that upped the stakes.
One theme that emerged on the Nils Petter Molavaer remix, even returns on the new LP to illuminate the epic Steve Reich-ish 'Man With The Movie Camera'.
The album - gloriously short and intense - starts with 'All That You Give', which features Fontella Bass, the jazz singer who wrote 'Rescue Me' in the 1960s and performed with seminal jazz collective the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
In fact Fontella married the lead singer Lester Bowie.
With Bowie now sadly two years passed away, the recording of 'All That…proved an emotional experience for Fontella. After initially struggling to record her verses, J reports that it all poured out in one take. Hearing the tape afterwards, with its lines "I'm grieving/ from my head to my toe" she began to cry for Lester for the first time since his death.
Needless to say, the single's amazing Matthew Herbert remixes also do her justice.
Fontella also sings on 'Evolution' a track that every also-ran producer in the music business should be made to listen to. Because when she wails 'Evolution!" you know she's using the imperative. Take heed.
Label cohort Roots Manuva appears on 'All Things To All Men', dropping the restrictions of rhyming structure to depict an honest account of his mind state. It's a sobering yet incredible view.
'Everyday' is littered with contradictions and dynamic non-seculars. Which is what makes it so amazing. Using jazz sounds in a modern context, they
invoke the kind of peaceful tension, the type of ecstatic bliss that only '60s jazz giants John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders can better.
OK, so that's the hard way over. To reiterate the easy way: this is a very special album.
Do yourself a favour.
