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Boards of Canada Tomorrow's Harvest Warp Records

10.06.13

Tomorrow’s Harvest doesn’t get off to a hugely promisingly start.

The gloopy faux-ident squelches that ease us into Gemini fade into juddering, strobing pirouettes of organ that bring ambient sound master Tim Hecker’s stunning Ravedeath 1972 to mind. But that’s a problem. You’d hope that an album which has taken this long to emerge, that’s come bundled in this much hype – think of the Record Store Day stunts, the Shibuya Crossing broadcast, the listening party in the desert – wouldn’t immediately sound this similar to another album that’s nearly contemporaneous with it. Though nothing else is as overt a homage, the feeling of familiarity – actual familiarity, as opposed to the half-lit, half-remembered hauntolgically forced semi-familiarity that the entire album is soaked in – is off-putting. We’re all versed in Tangerine Dream and Emeralds and Tim Hecker and Ambient 4: On Land now. We’ve listened to Boards of Canada before. We know what to expect.

Your enjoyment of Tomorrow’s Harvest largely lies in your willingness to submit to that sense of expectation while you inhale the duo’s third-joint-of-the-night wisdom and ease into the uneasy drift of their spectral bucolic rambles. You want creepy-crawly arpeggios spiderwalking over hazy pads? You’ve got them. Fancy fat phased-out synth leads two-stepping with leaden percussion? We can do that. How about songs that strive just that bit too hard to sound like something you’ve buried deep in the abyss of a summer holiday lost to the sands of time? You’re in luck. For the rest of us who were craving a pioneering record, Tomorrow’s Harvest is a let down.