Mind Bokeh

In the 1980s, pop music had a choice to make about its future. On the one hand, there was cerebral, icy avant-garde techno-pop to be mined, and on the other there was a sexy groovy R&B thing to be dug. Unsurprisingly, the last twenty years have concentrated most on the latter, but labels like Warp continue to pump out an alternative universe version of pop music that’s based on the former. It’s rhythmic, but more glitchy than groovy (where there is groove, the groove seems to be deliberately corrupted by off-kilter sampling, some over-literal time-keeping or an over-quantised beat). Bibio also has a bit of a folk influence going on. On some tracks like ‘K Is For Kelson’, all this coalesces into a poptastic whole. Generally though, as Bibio sings sincerely but oddly anonymously over beeps and swells and clicks and crunches and cut-up samples and funk guitar, it’s clever but leaves me feeling a bit cold.