A sense of déjà vu haunts The North Borders, UK producer Simon Green’s fifth studio album as Bonobo. It’s almost 15 years since he first appeared with the shy-footed but prescient “Terrapin”, which later appeared on his debut album Animal Magic and helped him find a name at the forefront of the downtempo electronica scene that bubbled up in the late 90s and early 2000s (a period when ambient pop albums like Air’s Moon Safari and Röyksopp’s Melody A.M. were scoring top 10 positions in the UK charts). Drawing on the noodling notions of jazz and trip hop, downtempo became the clubbing generation’s default after-hours music: the sound of a thousand compilation CDs made for slinging on after the club or soothing heads the morning after the night before.
Bonobo stood above the rest because his compositional touch was so instinctive: deftly coaxing complex emotions from machines while employing acoustic instrumentation sparingly to devastating effect. Throughout the 2000s he built on his reputation for sonic storytelling, culminating in his exquisite 2010 album Black Sands. Yet with The North Borders, Green appears to have hit a stumbling block. The balance is skewed and he all but drowns his knack for emotive instrumentation in the kind of introspective production that marked his formative period.
A number of tracks feature a stock approach to progression and release. They begin as densely layered, moody affairs, caught up in themselves and in the past. It’s only in the final minute or so that the underlying instruments are allowed to sing, and when they do the track finally feels alive in the present moment. On opening track “First Fires”, it’s the strings that finally rise above the cloudy production in the closing minute or so that provide the track with an anchor. There’s some truly lovely arrangement towards the end of “Sapphire”, when a chorus of reed instruments purr sagely to one another. Then again on “Ten Tigers” those heart-serrating strings tease in the background only to momentarily-- fantastically-- bloom as the track fades.
The problem is not so much that these instrumental flourishes are too little, too late, but that the tracks that hold them feel over-worked, the layers so dense as to stifle the ideas. “There's nobody there telling me when to stop, so often I end up adding a bunch more elements to the track after I originally thought it was done,” Green said recently. “I often have an idea and it starts splintering off into a whole lot of directions; I'm interested in exploring every single one of them.”
Green recorded the album in his new home of New York, following an extensive year and a half touring Black Sands, and you can hear his exhaustion in the album’s confusion. On one hand he appears to reach for dialogue with the chime-led melodies of Caribou and Four Tet on album standout “Cirrus”, a truly joyful, free moment on the album. But on the other hand, it finds him seeking refuge in a realm he knows inside out: lolloping, jazz-inflected soundscapes. While it sounds like he had fun collecting sounds on his travels-- from a truck’s air brakes to train doors closing on the subway-- they are lost in his layering. Even his track with Erykah Badu feels like a missed opportunity: it’s a sweet enough jam but she’s so deep in the mix on “Heaven For The Sinner” that she slips frustratingly out of focus. While for all intents and purposes The North Borders screams “easy listening,” it’s doesn’t half tie itself up in knots. At its worst-- the limp and dated bumble of “Jets”-- it feels like Bonobo-style music.
That said, his work with new singer Szjerdene has more energy: “Towers” breathes easier, while “Transits” has a narrative depth that largely evades the rest of the album. While it’s exciting that Green will be performing the album live with Szjerdene and a 10-piece orchestra, I can't help feeling he was playing safe by not fully embracing his orchestral exploration in the album’s recording. The North Borders is not a bad album-- for the most, it’s as inoffensive as those decade-old chill-out compilations-- yet a frustration persists because Bonobo is better than this.
