Two records in, Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project has carved out a clear niche for itself. Wilkinson is a pretty fair steel guitar player; his music essentially consists of recordings of him doing his thing and then processing the results in very specific ways. Every word I can think of to describe his music begins with the first letter of his last name: It sounds worn, weathered, woozy, warped, warbling, and warm. Wilkinson clearly loves folk and a certain strand of idyllic electronic music equally, and has found an efficient place for the two to meet.
Bibio's amorphous debut Fi came from nowhere, like something found underneath a moss-covered stone on a morning walk. Here on Hand Cranked he seems to have whittled his signature style down to a rather fine point. As someone who adores the sound of acoustic instruments bent and treated with common distortion, I'm willing to allow Wilkinson enormous latitude when it comes to his narrow production obsessions. Virtually every track here features plucked guitar treated in a small handful of ways, with the highs and lows filtered out (to give the old radio illusion of age) and on tape that just can't manage to maintain its speed. It's something a lot of people will tire of after a short while, but the sonority he manages somehow keeps me consistently engaged.
What's not working for me is Wilkinson's approach to songwriting. One bad habit he seems to have picked up from more recent Boards of Canada-- who first brought him to the attention of the label Mush-- is a tendency to use ridged loops of short phrases as the basis of composition. On the bulk of the tracks he plays two or three bars on one chord, then two or three bars on another, and then back to the first, ad nauseum. Though other subtle bits like backward leads and strands of drone are dropped in and out, the tracks in general are circular and static, without any particular reason for lasting any particular length of time. I can't help thinking that if Wilkinson were to take a few additional pages out of Ye Olde Book of British Folk and incorporate song and ballad chord structures into his work, while maintaining the aged recording techniques, he might really have something. The few tracks where he breaks out of his usual mold are far and away the most satisfying, particularly "Abberiw", a vocal track on which Wilkinson sings quite well (he sounds a tad like Robert Pollard, actually). I don't doubt we'll hear more from Bibio, but there's not much here to separate Hand Cranked from the slightly better debut.
