Four Tet - Three

Pitchfork

Read Philip Sherburne’s review of the album.

A Closer Listen

Would it be weird to say “welcome back” to Kieren Hebden, otherwise known as Four Tet?  After DJing in front of 100,000 fans at Coachella and Madison Square Garden along with Skrillex and Fred Again.., poking his head well into the mainstream world, the artist has returned to his indie roots; or perhaps he never left, and was just having the fun that he deserves.

We’re old enough to remember that Hebden was an integral part of Fridge, so we know that Three is not his third album; his career is now thirty years young, including twenty solo years.  Four years have passed since Sixteen Oceans, which includes the sublime, flute-centric “Teenage Birdsong.”  No stranger to singles, Four Tet has released, well, three over the last year, all appearing on the new album: in order, “Three Drums,” “Loved” and “Daydream Repeat.”  The first, released last April, is now the album’s closing track, a demonstration of Hebden’s dual love for beat-driven electronics and ambience.  It’s a great comedown track, growing more euphoric in its center with a drone-like whoosh before quieting down.  This preview track is also a taste of things to come, as the drums retreat at 4:41, leaving nearly four minutes of synth with tendrils of voice.

“Loved” is now the album’s opening track, a straightforward piece with a calm tempo and stereo effects.  Harder, thunder-like sounds approach mid-piece, but immediately vanish, as if a storm has threatened, then passed by.  The best of the three singles, “Daydream Repeat,” is a different animal, with twinkling, chime-like keys and propulsive percussion, like the sun emerging after the clouds have disappeared.  But even this doesn’t tell the whole story, as the album is sprinkled with other gems.  The most immediately appealing, “Gliding Through Everything,” wins points with a fitting title, then fulfills its promise with a matching sound.  The tone suggests an ability to “glide through everything” with one’s positivity intact.  Like “Three Drums,” the piece shifts to ambience midway; the difference is a shift from ambient to more ambient, from a kaleidoscopic sound to a placid sea. The guitar of “Skater” is a reminder of the artist’s post-rock beginnings, an Easter egg for fans.  As even more tracks retreat into ambience at the end instead of leaving just beats, they should make great DJ tools, allowing them to segue into non-Four Tet pieces that start with only a beat.

We’ll go ahead and say it, even though this may be the only album we’ve ever reviewed that was simultaneously reviewed by GQ.  Welcome back, Kieren!  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

Kieran Hebden is having his cake and eating it. The Scarlet Pimpernel of folktronica has been seen in the unlikeliest of places recently, such as stepping out with Skrillex and Fred Again for tag team DJ shenanigans in Times Square. It’s a world away from the hitherto popular perception of the producer as fastidious, nerdy and perhaps a little bit worthy, who more and more has beaten a retreat from public life over the last decade or so.

Back in 2010, you couldn’t move for Four Tet remixes jostling for earspace in the hipster joints, and it was around that time too that Hebden began to take stock and shed the baggage that he saw mostly as superfluous to his life, such as dealing with PR and doing rounds of interviews for each release. Albums came and went on Bandcamp with little or no fanfare and those truly engaged fans maintained their presence while the jetsam sank into the ocean of hype. Having perhaps made enough money, Hebden has sagely taken decisions to protect his own sanity like the well rounded person he seems to be, and one can only applaud that even if it makes it impossible to get an advance stream before release day.

Despite recent public bromances and reports of dropping Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’ into sets to please his daughter, Three, Hebden’s twelfth as Four Tet, rarely goes off-piste from what we’ve come to expect. Opener ‘Loved’ could have fitted neatly into almost any album from the last twenty years or so, while ‘Storm Crystals’ exemplifies the patchwork layering of sound that is his stock in trade. Only ‘Daydream Repeat’ hints at this pacier, dance-oriented iteration of Hebben, with its skittering, fizzing hi-hats and tubular swathes of feedback, which then transmogrify into some ice cream van–like pinky-plonkiness. Its arrival as fourth track brings a welcome levity to proceedings and you sort of wish there was more of it.

Nevertheless, if Three is predictable in its lack of surprises, in Hebden’s case, that can only mean what’s on offer is sturdy and assured. As a producer, he’s a master craftsman, working with his head to delicately manipulate the listener’s heart. Everything is pristine and spiritually uplifting, with a track like ‘Gliding Through Everything’ managing to traverse a whole emotional arc in under four minutes. Hebden creates textures like a high-end chocolatier, and where a song like ‘So Blue’ in the hands of, say, Oneohtrix Point Never would only induce frostbite, here it emanates an enveloping warmth redolent of late twentieth-century Moby. For any fans who like consistency in their Four Tet albums, Three will be the magic number. What anybody else thinks will unlikely concern him.

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Despite closing out Coachella's main stage and playing open to close at Madison Square Garden last year—both alongside Skrillex and Fred again..—Kieran Hebden, ..