Bleep

Four Tet’s album Rounds brought the artist’s unique take on jazz and folk via dance music to a sizeable audience in 2003, remaining one of his finest full lengths to date, and here celebrates its 10th anniversary in a special edition featuring bonus live material from Copenhagen. ‘My Angel Rocks Back and Forth’ remains an outstanding highlight of the artist’s career, with a sludgy iron lung beat propping up a lone folk harp lick to create a memorable and boldly sparse cut.

Whilst there is much to admire in the album’s more straightforward ballads, like ‘Unspoken’ or ‘Slow Jam’, it is in the record’s upbeat numbers that the most potent material is to be found, a forecast for the artist’s increasing move towards house and techno templates in the decade since ‘Rounds’ release. ‘She Moves She’ does wonders with jangling guitar samples and Steve Reich-esque glockenspiels which always land slightly outside of where one expects, and continually keep momentum for it.

‘As Serious As Your Life’ is pushed on by a crashing wall of cymbals and the beautiful ‘Hands’ stutters into tempo over the course of a minute via heartbeat drums and synthetic washes heard from a tantalising distance. Ten years on, revisiting ‘Rounds’ shows how far Kieran Hebden has come, but also offers the seeds of ideas which would reach fruition in subsequent albums.