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Outside of his current high profile remit as the focal point of large-scale dance music spectacles, Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden’s far-ranging musical adventures have taken in post-rock (as one third of Fridge), production duties for improv-driven new weird Americana heads Sunburned Hand of the Man and, on early solo albums such as 2003’s Rounds, folk/electronica hybrids commonly known as ‘folktronica’. Whilst William Tyler is probably still best known for such widescreen albums as 2013’s Impossible Truth and 2016’s Modern Country which catapulted the still fruitful, dirt track-tramping toolkit of folk-and blues-rooted US solo guitar traditions to the unstoppable and glossy multi-lane momentum of a contemporary autobahn, the guitarist and composer has long dabbled in more electronically enhanced templates, culminating in this year’s stunningly evocative masterpiece of uneasy Americana and ominous ambient hiss, Time Indefinite. As such, although they started from far-apart corners of the musical spectrum, Hebden and Tyler have gradually drifted towards each other’s stylistic post code areas.
Perhaps more improbable, then, is the fact that at least some of the credit for the full-length collaboration of 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s belongs to Hebden and Tyler’s shared enthusiasm for the classier offshoots of 1980s country music ala Joe Ely and Lyle Lovett. An 11-minute take on the latter’s easy-gliding “If I Had a Boat” both starts the album and forms a stylistic lodestar the duo doesn’t venture too far from. Presented initially with few of the tone-twisting, ground-shifting contortions that dotted Time Indefinite, Tyler strums and picks at the chiming chords of the original tune’s rippling central hook, essaying the hypnotic potential of chipping away at the same musical motif from all conceivable angles, before a rising digital mist and shape-shifting electronic interference start to submerge the track, which eventually crumbles into a murky swamp of static-infused abstraction. If the original tune hankered for the freshness of the lake or the sea, this rendition surfs towards the outer reaches of the cosmos.
Meditatively pretty yet also unsettlingly odd, both readily recognisable as the original tune and an entirely new composition (or composite), it’s a startlingly potent start, so it’s perhaps not surprising that Hebden and Tyler don’t venture too far from its ambient Americana blueprint over the course of 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s. There’s no space for digressions towards the funky-drumming sampledelica of last year’s jaw-dropping debut duo release, a turbulent 10-minute deconstruction of the Youngbloods’ classic “Darkness, Darkness”, which is both logical (it would break the flow of the album) and a shame, as there can be times during 41 Longfield Street Late '80s when it can’t help but feel like Hebden and Tyler are keeping themselves on too short a leash, too closely tethered to the ambient slow-burn territory mined for arguably greater emotional resonance on Time Indefinite, even if Hebden’s skittering beats work up a more sweaty and urgent pulse on “Spider Ballad”.
That said, it’s ultimately futile to fight the album’s considerable charms, culminating in “When It Rains”, a low-lit, minimalist beauty that eventually curdles into a storm of fiercely shrieking guitar feedback and electronic dissonance.
English (US) · 