Anna Meredith - Fibs

The Guardian 80

(Moshi Moshi/Black Prince Fury)
The brilliantly unpredictable composer is back making rollercoastering solo albums full of irreverent experiments and serious innovation

Not many musicians are made an MBE before they’ve released their second album, but Anna Meredith was given the honour this summer. Yet to frame the Scottish composer’s career in terms of solo records alone is rather misleading. The 41-year-old already had a storied career as a divisively experimental classical composer when she released her 2016 debut Varmints, an album whose synth-heavy confections were so maximalist and frenetic they often felt frighteningly unpredictable.

Related: Anna Meredith: ‘Is it classical, is it pop? I don’t really think about it that way’

Pitchfork 77

On her second album proper, the Scottish producer/composer/singer-songwriter dials up her rock band’s dynamic power, creating a nervy, chaotically controlled embodiment of contemporary uncertainty.

The Guardian 40

(Moshi Moshi)

Classical composer turned pop producer Anna Meredith, whose career still ranges from symphonic performance to body percussion, debuted in 2016 with Varmints. That album gamely mixed electronic and acoustic, instrumental and vocal, to uneven but intriguing effect. FIBS plays in the same sandpit, but too many songs feel inconsequential, disappearing as you listen to them. Moonmoons is briefly promising, before it loses interest in itself. More typically, Inhale Exhale begins like a headache and gets steadily more annoying.

You could maybe salvage Bump, a brassy, over-caffeinated number that might be remixed into a more brutally effective piece. Similarly, Calion’s tasteful techno threatens to uncoil into something Jon Hopkins would be proud of, but Meredith lacks his feel for the floor, his call to the hips.