While Nathan Fake's first full-length album (2006's Drowning in a Sea of Love) totally worked as a listenable and light-as-air take on the whole pastoral IDM thing, it also posed more questions about Fake's future than it answered. Consisting primarily of swathes of quivering synths intermingling with effortlessly melodic plinks and plonks, Drowning didn't just come on the death knell of that particular strand of electronic music-- it pretty much soundtracked it. Three years on, it's hard to imagine there's much of an appetite for any new music that sounds like Boards of Canada that isn't actually, you know, by Boards of Canada-- so what next for the 25-year-old Fake?
The answer, as it turns out, lies with his earlier EPs. Fake may have won psych-IDM accolades for the woozy swathes of noise highlighted by James Holden's seminal refit of "The Sky Was Pink" (for my money, one of the best 10 remixes of the decade), but his output before that was significantly more rhythm-obsessed. From 2003's unabashedly banging "Outhouse" to the more pointillist techno of 2005's "Dinamo", his initial string of 7"s and 12"s put an emphasis on the low-end that his post-"Pink" work pretty much ignored.
On his second full-length, Hard Islands, Fake addresses the what-next problem by shifting his primary focus back to the rhythm section and scaling the immensity of his sound back to something substantially less unruly. If the serrated minimal of opener "The Turtle" isn't enough to convince you of his re-prioritization, consider how this LP title plays off the last; this is a record that sounds, in all senses of the phrase, more grounded.
Which isn't to say that Fake's best trick (which involves a slowly deployed swathe of noise and feedback) has been retired altogether, just that he's learned to integrate it better. Beginning with a sharply minimal pulse and ending with a cacophony of flanged and reverbed organ pads, the aforementioned "The Turtle" is probably the album's single best example of that. Elsewhere, "Basic Mountain" marries a thumping minimal line with a detuned organ sound to similar effect, while album centerpiece "Castle Rising" bubbles with an acid-inspired synth line and a tech house-grounded rhythm. Meanwhile, with their scattershot rhythms, funhouse mirror melodies, and decaying synth leads, "Narrier" and "Fentiger" recall AFX's early day bubblebaths.
If there's anything disappointing about Hard Islands, it's the sheer lack of material. With only six songs on offer-- one of which is a 75-second interlude called "The Curlew"-- it's hard to feel like this is the assertive, confident statement Fake has it in him to make. As a strategic move out from the ghetto of nostalgic IDM Nowheresville, though, it'll suit just fine.
