This is the first album in 13 years from Boards of Canada, and from the opening notes – an analogue synth rising and falling like a sound effect in a forgotten 1960s radio play – you’re thrust back into one of the most instantly recognisable worlds in electronic music.
From 1995 debut EP Twoism onward, across four LPs and four more EPs, the Scottish duo – brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin – used the heavy gait of classic hip-hop beats to trudge through spectral ambient vistas, like spacemen sent through a time portal while still being tethered to the present. By grabbing samples from old public television and other vintage sources, they looked back at the utopian promise of the mid-20th century, while teasing out the latent kitsch and creepiness of these sounds.
Their music became hugely influential on everything from the US cloud-rap scene to the “hauntological” music of the UK’s Ghost Box label; you wouldn’t be surprised to find BOC albums on the shelves of film-makers such as the history-sampling Adam Curtis or folk horror fiend Ben Wheatley. But on Inferno, BOC themselves feel stuck in the past, overtaken by much more nimble electronic contemporaries.
The title suggests Dante’s hell, and the duo seem to be considering spiritual deliverance and damnation, though sometimes in a rather callow way. On Father and Son, voices of people having crises of faith are jokily cut up into a light funky rhythm, recalling the Avalanches’ Frontier Psychiatrist. Perhaps Richard Dawkins would be amused by it; others will find it excruciatingly unfunny. The Word Becomes Flesh uses a sample of an old educational video about the development of the human embryo, again cut up, this time into body-popping electro. Maybe it’s a genuine celebration of transubstantiation, but it feels like another jibe – not to mention that sample being a total BOC cliche. In this context, the appearance of sampled Hare Krishna chanting on the ghastly Naraka makes it seem as if they’re laughing at eastern religion, too – either that or they’re just deploying lazy orientalism (which later reappears with the sitar twang of Deep Time). A better critique of religion comes on All Reason Departs, with the treatise of some Christian nationalist (“the initiation of a new beyond … a great war must be fought”) pitched into a demonic whisper.
At least BOC are engaging in ideas – the deeper problem with Inferno is how dull much of the actual music is. To their credit the brothers have expanded their range, particularly with the addition of guitars: lead single Prophecy at 1420 MHz recalls their countrymen Mogwai. Somewhere Right Now in the Future is drumless dream pop, while Into the Magic Land sounds like Tortoise (albeit entirely absent of the Chicago band’s sense of swing). There are updates to core BOC sounds, such as the satisfyingly fat synthwave lines that strafe across the arrangements of Arena Americanada and Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan. But the beats on those tracks, along with so many others here, are wretchedly pedestrian, plodding along in dreary, funkless steps. The nadir is You Retreat in Time and Space, which sounds like hold music for a broadband provider.
BOC were always at their best when they wielded a light-touch version of those trip-hop beats, as on Kid for Today, or a different rhythmic mode entirely, as on proto-dubstep track Amo Bishop Roden (both from the superb, even visionary 2000 EP In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country). And sure enough, the best tracks on Inferno are beatless. Age of Capricorn sets a priestly sermon in front of a stained glass window of almost Coldplay-scale chiming ambient sound and hymnal melody. The Process has enjoyably bewildering babble from an AI-like female voice set against watery instrumentation and the sound of bustling crowds, and the 78-second interlude Acts of Magic is a scary throb of noise from the lip of hell’s pit, complete with buzzing fly.
Dotted across 70 minutes of music, these highs are fleeting. Inferno is another epic BOC album statement and diehard true believers will bow down to the duo’s ability to conjure their signature corrupted nostalgia anew. The rest of us might regard them as we would a cult leader: impressive, even charismatic figures with a dubious amount of substance.
