Pause is the second solo album from Fridge's Kieran Hebden. It's a good-natured and engaging mix of subtle sample manipulation, music concrete, downtempo dance beats and pop experiments. It reminds me a bit of Tommy Guerrero's A Little Bit of Somethin'.
"Glue of the world" lays a typewriter sample over smooth drums, new-agey synths and guitar picking. It ends with a strange little section of dueling guitars, which leads directly into the crashing waves and manic windchimes that introduce "Twenty three". "Twenty three" is one of those dance tracks that accrues its elements gradually, one at a time; first the windchimes, then the guitar and a percussive, repeating flute sample, and finally a funky beat. After a while, a plaintive horn solo comes in and tells everyone that it's time for bed.
"Harmony one" layers pretty backwards/forwards/chopped up organ over close-miked mechanical sounds of inscrutable origin. "Parks" does the slow build up thing again; this time the elements are recordings of children playing, pretty high synth tones, cello-like bass tones, plucked strings and natural sounding drums.
The disc's best song title is undoubtedly "Leila came round and we watched a video". It's also one of the most enjoyable tracks, with a tense but lovely mix of low, harshly distorted sounds, gently plucked guitar and a ringing synth tone. A super-square disco drum machine lays down the beat in "Untangle", as subtle synths and a harp noodle around in the background. The guitar on "Everything is alright" has a Latin-lite feel, while the drums are purposefully muted and flabby sounding. Not sure what that one's all about.
"No more mosquitoes" is the only track with vocals. Here, instead of the standard house diva yaddling on, we get a kid singing "Oh, no, no, no more mosquitoes" over a big beat and lots of twiddly electro-noises. I'm not complaining. "Tangle" is a lot like "Untangle", except backwards and without the drums. Or something.
"You could ruin my day" uses some kind of crappy harpsichord samples, a cheesy drum kit (wood blocks?) and lite-jazz synths to make a not-very-interesting keyboard demo. Once the heavy bass kicks in at the end it's okay, but this is mostly pretty bad. Sorry. "Hilarious movie of the 90s" wraps things up with a clever and pretty montage of bells, CD skips, vocal sounds and drums.
I'm liking this more and more as I listen through it several times. It's a bit too cheerful in spots, and a couple times Hebden seems to have been seduced by the "let's make generic noodly music with our multitrack recorder" fairy. But there's a lot of genuinely creative and lovely music here, too. People who like their beats mellow and their experiments subtle will find this Pause refreshing.
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