Of course a new album from the black Dog is going to be a special event in the electronic music calendar. It’s just a question of how British techno’s most enigmatic and fascinating sonic foragers choose to exact their micro-surgery on the cold machines and what kind of carnage they want to cause. The follow-up to 2005’s Silenced, which was dominated by orchestral space symphonies and slow-to-mid tempos, skilfully manages to up the tempo with the return of the 4:4, homage the past as tracks like ‘U.V. Sine’ recall classic Mr Fingers with strings which come into their cinematically-sweeping own on ‘Witches Ov’ and, most intriguingly, create subtle mental tremors as ‘E.V.P. Echoes’ explores Electronic voice Phenomenon. The group say some tracks include hidden coded messages and curses! Another noticeable difference is the bass levels – huge, swelling and all-enveloping to the point where a nearby buffalo evacuated his bowels with one blast this morning. The singles ‘Riphead v9’ and ‘Floods v3.9’ already signalled something great about to steam out of the tunnel but, all sequenced together, this album is something of a masterpiece which, by the time it’s nearly over with the lovely ancient-sounding piano of ‘Ghost Vexations’, can sit as an all-time electronic classic itself. But it may take some time for that fact to be realised….
5 Out Of 5
Reviewed By: Kris Needs
