Boards Of Canada Inferno

Label / Warp Records
Category / Downtempo, Ambient, IDM, Illbient, Leftfield
Code / WARPLP496

"It can't be easy for Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin; as soon as they cracked the code with 'Music Has the Right to Children' in 1998, their home-brewed signature sound - tape-warped, reverb-soaked monosynths, stuttering dialog samples and thumping MPC-breaks - became a sort of meme, regurgitated by a wave of bedroom musicians so frequently that the original references became fully hollow. Those early records were great because they sounded so unique, marking a landscape littered with post-'Chiastic Slide' crunches and choppy AFX-ian amens with new channels of thought. Just go back to their shadowy 'Twoism', 'Hi Scores', or that Mask 500 cover of 'Midas Touch' - there was nowt else like it. By the time we got to 'The Campfire Headphase', a comparatively sunny, guitar-led misstep that arrived a few years later and then 2013's 'Tomorrow's Harvest' - it all felt like diminishing returns. 'Inferno''s mysterious VHS rollout also felt overly familiar - and if you're gonna tease, the payoff best be worth it. Sadly, first single 'Prophecy At 1420 MHz' was damp and old fashioned, lumpen with boxy '80s drums and awkward prog rock synths - the signs didn't look good. Heard as a whole though, 'Inferno' hangs together pretty well. The brothers do a good job of laying out a vision of hell that's intricately connected to their well-worn source material: the lost future that was promised to wide-eyed 1970s kids raised on color TV, welfare and action figures. Back then, religious cults and street cranks were screaming of damnation, convincing weakened minds that judgement was coming while the Vietnam War raged - real hell was on the doorstep all along. And it's hard not to hear Boards' blend of seemingly old-fashioned religious symbolism (the Hare Krishna chants, chopped-up divinity school lectures and guided meditations) as an indirect reference to the wars raging right now. Certainly, it's their darkest album in years; not the aesthetic darkness of 'Tomorrow's Harvest', either. 'Father and Son', with its eerie Abrahamic symbolism, feels like an American Gothic reflection of Leslie Nielsen's comparatively benign narrations on 'Geogaddi', while 'Memory Death' feels like Boards actively sending off their own patented brand of hauntology with the EKG blip to prove it. Throughout the record, BoC appear to juxtapose a cultural concept of hell with their own aesthetic responses, balancing dystopian robot voices with squelchy acid gurgles on the excellent 'The Word Becomes Flesh' and Bobby Beausoleil-style chiming strings on 'Blood in the Labyrinth'. 'The Process', meanwhile, offers a late-stage vision of aviation hell, a 'Langoliers'-style horror cue that neatly precedes the saccharine vintage BoC hit of 'You Retreat in Time and Space'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's these beatless moments that really hold things together - maybe they should have just leaned into it and done a full length of those vignettes. Still, 'Inferno' has its moments."

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Boards Of Canada Inferno

Same Artist :: Boards Of Canada

Same Label :: Warp Records

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