(Ninja Tune)
The sound of TCO’s tasteful electronica has become ubiquitous. This new album isn’t experimental or idiosyncratic enough to stand out
Even if you believe yourself to be unaware of the Cinematic Orchestra, the London collective formed in 1999 by Jason Swinscoe, you will more than likely be familiar with one of their songs. To Build a Home – a spare and exquisitely beautiful piano ballad featuring the Canadian musician Patrick Watson – has become a TV score standard in the decade since its release, soundtracking a slew of blockbuster dramas. Yet while the song’s ethereal melancholy has proven enduring, its makers have dipped out of view in the intervening years. To Build a Home was the opening track on the Cinematic Orchestra’s 2007 record Ma Fleur – until now, the last proper album they released.
That makes To Believe a comeback of sorts, an opportunity for the 20-year-old group to restate their relevance. To those ends, Swinscoe has described the album as a contemplation on belief in the age of Brexit. Yet while the verbose track titles hint at lofty ideas, the songs don’t so much pin down and interrogate our modern malaise as transpose it into wilful abstraction. Sonically, meanwhile, the topic leads the group to set up camp in the space between their second and third albums – the former ominous, jazzy, trip-hop-informed; the latter a prettier, more wistful collection of featured-artist crooning. At one end of the spectrum is A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life, which sees the group reunite with Roots Manuva – who guested on their edgy, expansive 2002 track All Things to All Men – for a mellower collaboration. To Believe’s titular opener, a pared-down vehicle for Moses Sumney’s soft, airy and soaring vocal, cleaves most closely to Ma Fleur’s style, but can’t quite recapture its muted majesty.
Continue reading...by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian
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