For two decades, Four Tet has stayed remarkably consistent. It’s hard to think of another electronic musician whose work feels so tactile: Sampling acoustic instruments from folk and jazz recordings, his music revels in the physicality of sound—the way a plucked string quivers in the air or a drum brush tickles a snare head. His touch is unmistakable, and while Sixteen Oceans is frequently gorgeous and sometimes gripping, there are signs he’s starting to repeat himself.
Until now, Kieran Hebden has kept his music fresh by subtly tweaking his formula. Ten years ago, with There Is Love in You, he began channeling the energy of clubs like London’s Plastic People, a basement joint where dubstep and house were spawning mutant forms. With Pink and Beautiful Rewind, he pushed deeper into the dance floor, teasing the balance between his own vision and dance music’s collective spirit. Morning/Evening’s pair of hypnotic, 20-minute tracks took an extended detour into Indian devotional music and film soundtracks, and 2017’s New Energy synthesized all of his interests, looping back to the slow-motion bliss of his early work on songs like “Two Thousand and Seventeen” and reasserting his peak-time bona fides on floor-fillers like “SW9 9SL.”
In sound and spirit, Sixteen Oceans feels like a companion to New Energy, a mix of club-ready barnstormers and downbeat daydreams, held together by field-recorded miniatures and ambient etudes. Four Tet shares a palette of muffled rimshots and flashing hi-hats with his occasional collaborator Burial, and his more forceful beats remain charged with the snap and swing of 2-step. Slower tracks, like “Teenage Birdsong” and “Romantics,” fall back on spaced-out hip-hop grooves. Regardless of tempo, they all share the same basic elements: acoustic instruments (harp, flute, bells, and harpsichord) interwoven with dreamy synthesizers that curl like wisps of colored smoke. The predominance of birdsong gives the album the feel of a stroll through an aviary; when there are voices, they are invariably wordless, pitch-shifted, and just this side of melancholy. Everything feels calibrated for a certain Goldilocks zone of wistful reverie—not too heavy, not too light, neither forlorn nor jubilant.
Sixteen Oceans is best when Hebden disturbs the placid surface. “Insect Near Piha Beach” bumps along atop the sort of choppy drum groove that Hebden can write in his sleep, but its cascading pentatonic scales pile up in a way that sounds new, pouring down accelerating and decelerating runs in a way that threatens to overwhelm the rhythmic grid. “Love Salad” is virtually the platonic ideal of a Four Tet song, but as it gathers force, it begins to spill over into exciting dissonance. But “School” and “Something in the Sadness,” which are virtually identical—same key, instrumentation, same tempo, practically the same beat—somehow never manage to spark the same sort of rapture. They tap out at “beautiful” rather than tipping over into the ecstatic.
Sixteen Oceans is 16 tracks long, yet five of them are basically interludes—minute-or-two-long sketches made of watery synth pads, tape hiss, or rudimentary beats. Strangely, most of them fall toward the end of the album. In fact, after “Something in the Sadness,” the record’s driving climax, the album’s final six tracks all zigzag between marginally differentiated pastel dream states. From titles like “1993 Band Practice,” “Bubbles at Overlook 25th March 2019,” and “Mama Teaches Sanskrit,” one gets the sense that many of these pieces have personal meaning for Hebden, but these blurry snapshots don’t impart much more than a feeling of bittersweet serenity. Were they threaded more evenly through the album, they might serve as a kind of mood-stabilizing connective tissue between the more upfront songs; as it is, they feel mostly like an extended denouement, a slow drift into the doldrums. The same could be said for Sixteen Oceans as a whole: The view’s lovely, but for the moment, it feels like Hebden is sailing in circles.
Buy: Rough Trade
