Bibio has been doing the same thing for a long time—a little bit of everything. Stephen Wilkinson's restlessness over the last decade makes it hard to pin him down, but it also makes it easy to keep listening to the diverse pop pastiches that have developed out of his more uniform sound-collage origins. A Mineral Love might be just another turn of the kaleidoscope, but it grows on you, with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records.
There are consistent things about Bibio, and even though they are general ones, he has refined his way with them to make them his. There are carefully detuned guitars that lend an alien sonority to familiar chords. There are analog electronic imperfections texturing the music with streaks and bubbles, like some obsolete, richly colored film stock. And there is his voice, soft and threadbare as a childhood blanket, to cling to during his wildest rides.
It's just that these steadfast traits happen to be set loose in a slightly insane maze of genres, often time-stamped in maddeningly specific but elusive ways. IDM, British folk, pop funk, indie rock, easy listening, hip-hop, nature sounds, ad jingles, relaxation tapes, church-social Casio jams, and more reform like a lava lamp's globules. It wasn't always this way: Bibio's early work basically mashed up Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and Bert Jansch, until his genre gene pool seemed to explode all at once.
Each album since then has managed to wrest a distinct character from the welter of registers: Ambivalence Avenue was dominated by crunchy glitch-hop; Mind Bokeh was a woolly headphones odyssey; Silver Wilkinson was gloomy and internal. A Mineral Love bursts with cheerful, candy-colored falsetto funk, not unlike Ambivalence, while leaving out the crunch and glitch, letting the instruments breathe. The guitars flirt with African pop, blending with the overall brightness, while the bass conveys the tactile, mobile sense of fretwork. There are fleeting mechanical hitches, but mostly, low-key tape tricks color straightforward musicianship, its springy fillips more evocative of the bounce in your step on a sunny day than night, sweat, or sex.
There is a bit of the pitchy dream-folk that always serves as an accessible entryway into Bibio's records, like "Petals" and "Wren Tails," a pastoral instrumental warbling on a melted record. But most songs play like breakbeats from late-twentieth-century audio and VHS cassettes that never were. "Raxeira" sounds like theme music for an unfilmed Welcome Back, Kotter spinoff. You wouldn't be shocked to hear Jim Croce singing on the fluty confection "Town & Country." We also get Peter Gabriel-like progressive pop on "The Way You Talk," where Gotye's voice meditatively pools in itself, and Princely R&B on Olivier Daysoul feature "Why So Serious?," which wouldn't go amiss on a Blood Orange album. "Feeling" is Bibio and the Sunshine Band. Et cetera. It should feel like a music museum, but it doesn't.
What holds it all together and brings it to life is Bibio himself, who offers some revealing self-reflections in a note circulating with A Mineral Love, where he seems to anticipate criticisms of randomness and anachronism that he must have encountered before. "This is not a purist record," he warns, describing how he approaches different musical eras through their remnants in his memory, however misshapen they may be. "I think that's why it all sounds like me."A Mineral Love is a period piece, but the period is now.
