Never The Right Time

It Should Be Us appeared in 2019 as a kind of stopgap, presented as a quickly made double EP, with the true follow-up to the 2016 LP Too Many Voices lined up for 2020. Andy Stott was well on the way to following through until a serious life disruption rendered his promised fifth album unfinished. Months later, a recharged Stott completed a full-length markedly dissimilar to the partial version. That Never the Right Time sounds just like an Andy Stott album, and is separate from what preceded it, offers further proof that the producers body of work -- like that of fellow hardcore-continuum accelerator Burial -- is in a realm of its own, albeit one with an atmosphere affected by ever-shifting inspirations. Where It Should Be Us stimulated vigorous movement with juddering house and scrambled juke tracks, Never the Right Time is much lighter in touch, if heavier in emotions that seem unresolved. Nothing exemplifies this as much as whats at the center, a solo piano piece ready to unfurl into a colossal torch song, only to dissipate within 90 seconds. Before and after that are some of Stotts most transfixing collaborations with Alison Skidmore. While Skidmores voice is tender as ever and still phantasmal, cloaked in reverb, her unease shoots through the trembling basslines, tumbling drums, and metallic synthesizers. Some tracks do bring the pain in the rhythmic sense. Layers of percussion in Never the Right Time wrench and stammer. Overdriven drums rain down in Answers. The dizzying Repetitive Strain, one of Stotts most peculiar tracks, is something like calliope bashment. No matter the artistic sure-footedness, an air of inner uncertainty is constant. Its also in the emotionally bruised sampled voices and the odd keyboard melodies, and throughout the Ambient 4: On Land-like looming threat of Dove Stone. More subtly, its in a few track titles that read like terse texts of faint reassurance and vexation. What might look and sound like merely another Stott album has the deepest well of emotion. ~ Andy Kellman

マンチェスターを拠点として活動し、モダン・ラヴのコア・メンバーとして知られるアンディ・ストットの8作目。目を惹くジャケット・デザインは、モダン・ラヴのレーベルのカラーとも言えるモノクロを基調とし、初作から一貫したこの配色が彼の纏う陰鬱で美しい空気を見事に表現している。今作ではアリソン・スキッドモアのヴォーカルが歌ものとして機能し、いままでになくポップな印象を受けるものの、ダークな音響とエクスペリメンタルなダブ・テクノは健在。それらがギリギリで崩れず絶妙な感覚でバランスを保っているあたり、近年の集大成と言えるだろう。彼の作品に関しては、イヤホンやヘッドフォンでダイレクトに聴覚を刺激するのではなく、スピーカーで部屋の空気を刺激しながら聴くことをお勧めしたい。
bounce (C)長谷川義和