Four Tet – Three (a review?)

If I’m writing a review (if this even is a review; perhaps it’s more of a reflection) of a Four Tet album there are some things, some personal and some contextual, I need to get across in the opening paragraph(s), because either a; I mention them every time I write about Four Tet, or b; every other idiot does. So rather than waste time concocting those paragraphs, let’s just bullet them:

• “Everything Is Alright” from Pause was the first song I ever downloaded via Audiogalaxy when I got back home after finishing university
• His real name is Keiran Hebden
• A cute girl in the record shop sold me Pause in 2001
• In 2010, reader, I married her, and we played “Slow Jam” from Rounds during the ceremony
• Three is his 12^th album sort of
• I saw him live in 2003 and it was a bit disappointing and I saw him again in 2011 and it was AMAZING
• Something about ‘folktronica’
• When you take his pseudonyms and collaborations into account, he seems to be releasing music almost constantly and even I, as a big fan, cannot keep up
• Skrillex / Fred Again / Madison Square Gardens / Taylor Swift remix for his daughter
• He’s never released a bad record or even a mediocre one
• All his records kind of sound the same

There you go. I’m free now to write about Three.

I loved the slow-burn melancholy of “Three Drums” when it came out last year as a (then) stand-alone single, and also the length of it (Four Tet stretching-out to 8 minutes plus is very welcome in my world). But possibly what I loved most about it was the grit in the oyster: the slow building of almost feedback-like noise amongst the layers of laconic drums, sweet melody, and plangent strings. The insertion of that noise, that edge, did what I so often love in music, pushing me away and attracting me at the same time.

When “Loved” came out earlier this year I had a similar reaction. The languid hip-hop beat and beatific, melancholy synths were similarly disturbed, this time less by layers of feedback than some jarring, distorted percussive elements that interrupted the mix from leftfield. Both tracks also featured pseudo-ambient codas, periods of vatic space after the ‘song’ proper, if you will, had finished, where the music just continued to exist, peacefully, for no reason beyond the fact that it was lovely.

A few weeks later “Daydream Repeat” did the same thing again, this time strafing sheets of noise rising and falling within the mix almost from the off, obscuring the more dancefloor-oriented beat and the harp-like chiming riff that sounds like about a dozen things he’s done before without actually being that similar to any of them. This trend of injecting some woozy, almost My Bloody Valentine-ish noise into his music, was, predictably, something I found almost impossibly exciting. I browsed his recent releases to see what else I’d missed: a chill-out-esque collaboration with William Tyler, which is excellent; an entire album with Madlib; and – oh my! – a single called “Mango Feedback”! Surely this meant Hebden was prepping some kind of shoegazing hip hop opus?

“Mango Feedback” is actually a really skippy, two-step kind of thing with a typically twinkling, reverberating melody that might be played on a kora or some kind of unusual synth that Hebden probably bought on Mars (his Instagram often reveals him playing melodies on all manner of instruments I know not what they are). But it does feature a sweeping cloud of quasi-industrial noise, more like hydraulic brakes dying than ‘feedback’, but enough to justify the title.

“Mango Feedback” didn’t make the album in the end – it’s probably 50% too upbeat and twitchy – but hip hop and shoegaze definitely do feel like the strongest flavours running through Three. Hear “Skater”, which sounds like DJ Shadow remixing some shoegaze or dreampop track, the chiming guitars and distant, muffled vocal sample deep in the mix heavily redolent of Cocteau Twins (Pitchfork made this direct comparison but damnit I’d said this out loud to that cute record shop girl before I’d read their review).

There are other styles covered, though, of course: “Gliding Through Everything” is an unexpected diversion into practically beatless ambient territory immediately after “Loved” – where the beat is SO important, from its rhythm to its texture to its sheer weight of impact when you turn it up – sets the scene by opening the album, the juxtaposition unexpected without being jarring. Because somehow – is it his melodies, his textures, his ethos, his emotional palette? – Four Tet somehow always manages to sound almost exactly like Four Tet, even as he tries on different styles, genres.

This cohesion, this gestalt, has been aided for the last 23 years by Jason Evans – https://www.instagram.com/jasonevansfoto/?hl=en – who has done artwork on, I think, every Four Tet release since Pause. His rainbow colour palette, use of circular motifs and repeating paterns, and hazy, pseudo-nostalgic use of shallow focal depth has always seemed like an absolute perfect match to Hebden’s music, for me at least. Call it synaesthetic if you like, but Four Tet’s music so often sounds how bokeh (those lush, hazy balls of colour you get with a proper camera lens when you throw distant lights out of focus) looks, the two different sensory phenomenon evoking the same emotional response.

So, then, Three. Feedback, hip hop, codas (“31 Bloom” features another beautiful ending after the drums fade away), colours, ambience, emotions, bliss. The dancefloor, the living room, the great outdoors, the inside of your cerebellum. I could make a claim about it being his best album, or my favourite, but Rounds and There Is Love In You and New Energy and Sixteen Oceans have all occupied that spot before and shuffled amongst themselves ever since. Right now Three does exactly what I wanted it to do when I heard “Daydream Repeat” for the first time and identified the trend of noise/interference and ambient codas running through it, “Loved” and “Three Drums”, the latter of which may just be my favourite single thing he’s done.

I thought Sixteen Oceans was a little slight and pretty on first exposure, before it became a balm for the collective trauma of the pandemic. The last four years have accelerated and dragged at the same time. This feels like the first real spring since 2020. Another spring, another lush Four Tet album. Three feels more substantial, more emotionally rich. After experiencing trauma (don’t I know it), you cannot ever return to the pre-trauma status quo; by enduring trauma you are changed by it, and when you emerge on the other side you will be stronger, albeit scarred, for what you’ve been through. Your appreciation of the little things, hopefully, will have grown. Your desire to live life focussed by the knowledge that it can be turned upside-down unexpectedly. Three, to me, feels like it’s a bona fide product of life after the pandemic.