Tuesday Is For Tunes: Four Tet

This week on Tuesday Is For Tunes: Four Tet. While by no means new to me, Four Tet has a new album coming out next week entitled There Is Love In You. A preview of the entire album was posted on Soundcloud Sunday, so it went without question that Four Tet would be the featured music-maker this week.

First up for review, the single, Love Cry, that has been available for a while on Four Tet’s Myspace profile. Clocking in at over nine minutes long, it is an excellent introduction to the album, which should under no circumstances be broken down into pithy sound bites. The length of the song gives it time to not only build up, but to branch out and explore as well. Humming distortion sets the tone for a full minute before the sweetest of drumbeats kicks in: I mean so sweet it does salacious things to my hips. However, at the same time I can still feel the synth expanding between my ears. About halfway through, the sampled vocals that give the song its name join the mix. Their repetition seems to only enhance the forlorn tinge of the vocals, consequently making my own heart yearn. When you consider the fact that the possibilities are really endless for electronic music, since it can sample any sound in existence, this song is comparably simple. Yet, for me at least, it is an encompassing experience that moves me: mind, body, and soul. I’ve listened to it easily a hundred times, but it’s still just as vibrant and captivating as the first time I heard it.

Even better, the album is equally enduring, pulsating with complexities that unceasingly hint at gripping new possibilities. I’ve been listening to it on repeat as much as possible, since I found in Monday morning. If I had to guess, I would say that would roughly be almost 20 hours of There Is Love In You in the last 36 hours. Four Tet has run off with essence of my being, and taken it somewhere beyond the rainbow, the second star to the right and straight on far past morning. This album sounds like the most flighty of my dreams, the ones even I have been unable to quantify or express. It is arguably the most comprehensive Four Tet album yet, composing an aural microcosm that tessellates out through the sequence of songs to form a complete ecosystem of a soundscape. Actually, I just used the word ecosystem, because it’s vibrant. I’m not sure that really does justice to the scope of the album or the similarity of its atmosphere to that of a lucid dream. It’s more almost more like it forms a complete dimension of surreal sound visions.

Unfortunately, it seems like this is shaping up to be one of my least successful attempts to describe and review music. Let me just leave you with a recommendation. Clear out an hour of completely free time to just listen to There Is Love In You. The album is about forty-seven minutes long, and it won’t hurt to take thirteen minutes of silence afterwards to just let your ears digest. Don’t take breaks, or listen to it in sections. Listen to the whole thing, nonstop. Let it get in your head and heart. There Is Love In You by Four Tet comes out on Domino Records January 26th. I for one will be purchasing it posthaste.
Stream There Is Love In You in entirety on Soundcloud
Pre-order There Is Love In You from Domino Records