Who's Your Hard Normal Daddy? Squarepusher Returns with "Ultravisitor"

"Ultravisitor," Squarepusher's ninth (or seventh, by some people's tally) disc is a good ride, but not one without some potholes and speed bumps along the road. The disc verges on greatness, but the overall impression is that as a collection the album at times feels like a hit-and-miss affair.

Like many artists exploring and exploiting every nook and cranny and pathway of their musical palette to find new challenges, solve new musical conundrums and erase boredom, Squarepusher (otherwise known as an English bloke named Tom Jenkinson) keeps fiddling and noodling and looking for some new underdeveloped territory by his mind and Fender-Rhodes-bass-plucking / knob-twiddling / sequence-programming / drum-playing hands.

Right out of the starting gate comes the album-titled first track, "Ultravisitor," a track straight out of the Squarepusher playbook with the signature high-speed, drum-and-bass patter and blips and bleats and breaks and organ riffs all rolling out ahead of themsleves and on top and pricking up our ears again with the derailed collage of random-like noise and samples stitched together with barbed wire and velvet. We are transported to heaven.

This is hardly new ground for Squarepusher, but tracks like this and "Menelec" and "Steinbolt" still have the atomic power to riddle our fibers with excitement and surprise and keep us guessing in a way that jolts the synapses (ideally staving off future risks of developing Alzheimer's disease in the process).

Despite this, "Ultravisitor" is a strange, mixed blessing. On the one hand, the disc puts Jenkinson's stamp on the proceedings, an alternating combination of tracks with his usual extraordinarily frenetic, fragmented and alienated drum-and-bass tracks and his jazz-bass-fusion-like forays that dive into long prog-rock-ish interludes, extended bass solos and meanderings that otherwise come off as plain instrumental wanking. "C-Town Smash" and "An Arched Parkway" take this ball and run it past the goal posts out of the stadium.

It's during tracks like these and parts of the second tune, "I Fulcrum," that we can't help but think of a scene in the 1980's Rob Reiner mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap," in which the aging, irrelevant dinosaur British rock group, Spinal Tap, loses its lead guitarist, who runs out on the group in a huff just before a concert and in doing so strips his bandmates of performing 99% of their material. But the fans are waiting and the show must go on, so the Tap copes by staging a performance not of their string of now-nostalgic rock hits from the '70's, but rather an obscure and best-forgotten full album's worth of instrumental jazz-prog-rock centered around long bass solos.

This is what we were thinking half-way through "Ultravisitor." Or to put it another way, after a dozen listens, we pushed the skip button on these tracks time after time, though, eventually, curiosity got the better of us and we went back to listen to them again.

But then we come to mysterious track No. 12, "Circlewave," wherein we get a taste of something we've never heard before from Squarepusher and something we've never heard exactly this way from any arist.

The track is a disorderly layer of gentle drums, like a spastic percussionist with a serious timing problem singlemindedly and quickly struggling to to rescue a basic beat from the sonic rubble until that magical instant when it breathes to life quietly and slowly and the track is angelically resolved with the arrival of a slow somber, funereal organ melody that builds subtly to the heavens and sounds as if it could be at home in some vast European cathedral.

At the tail end of Ultravistor we also get the beautiful "Tommib Help Buss," the title of which suggests something in common with a Squarepusher track called "Tommib" on the "Lost in Translation" film soundtrack. But this is not seem the case. The tracks are of the same mood, but sound different and are painted with different shades.

The rest of "Ultravisitor" falls predictably into place at points in between the slow-and-quiet and the speedy-and-chaotic, with the exception of the fourth track, "Andrei," which has a warm and gentle classical Spanish guitar buoying the tune in sharp contrast to the rest of "Ultravisitor."

"Andrei" is more like what you'd hear in a ridiculously expensive boutique selling high-end, but low-key-looking, home furnishings hand-built by the Dutch furniture designers who dreamed them up. Soundtrack music for the Wallpaper set's consumer experience. But damn, it's beautiful. Hearing it makes you want to quit your day job and fly off to the Costa de Sol and spend the rest of eternity idling romantically in front of dreamy sunsets.

Part of what sets "Ultravisitor" apart is its pseudo-live-recording, with audience whoops and cheers imported into the mix when the music quiets or has just rounded a difficult corner.

And as most live recordings go (whether real of fake), it has that "live" sound, where the audio alternates between being just a little too tinny and just a little too muddy to just plain sounding like your're listening to "Ultravisitor" off to the side in a big cavern, which in a virtual sense you are and in a real sense is also the whole point. We rarely get to hear this kind of music in this way.

Leave it to Jenkinson to keep us guessing. Listeners until now unfamiliar with the Squarepusher ouevre may shake their heads in confusion to "Ultravisitor." Squarepusher's music evokes largely love or hate responses. While it may be a mixed bag for some, on balance this disc ranks up among the best, most provoking Squarepusher work yet.

--Adrian "Pushsquarer" Tharani

RELATED LINKS

Warp Records Website

Squarepusher Minisite at Warp Records

Squarepusher Discography [Discogs.com]

Musicplayer Forum Discussion on Squarepusher

Perfect Sound Forever's 1999 Squarepusher Interview

Squarepusher "Go Plastic" Audio Streams [Warp Records]

Pitchfork's "Ultravistor" Review [Pitchfork Media]

The Guardian's "Ultravisitor" Reviewed [Guardian Unlimited]