Like I said with the Aphex Twin post yesterday, basically everyone should listen to this album, in part because it is massively influential. Even Radiohead has said (I think, somewhere, maybe) that they basically ripped off this album and added vocals to it for most of Kid A and Amnesiac. And you can directly blame this album for bullcrap like “The Gloaming”. The thing that makes Autechre (and Aphex) so special, though, is that no one can successfully imitate them, though now lots of things sound a little like them.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to even attempt to say what the music here sounds like. It’s not easily describable—none of these pieces have traditional song structures, none of them have vocals at all (minus “is it washable?” in “Under BOAC”), rarely is there a “beat” that stays unchanged for any length of time. At the same time, it’s not drone or ambient or any kind of “true experimental” music. The best I can do is call it “sound sculpture” (as ever since I saw the video for “Gantz Graf” that is always in my head for any Ae), or to say that it is the definition of IDM. Not Squarepusher-style let’s-call-this-drum-n-bass-something-else IDM, but actually an attempt to fuse dance music (though they’d kind of dropped that influence by LP5) and more avant-garde material. And this is before the advent of glitch.

Still, though, I’ll mention that “acroyear2″, “fold4,wrap5″, “Arch Carrier”, and “drane2″ are among the best songs I’ve ever heard. “fold4,wrap5″ is achingly beautiful, I am tempted to put “Arch Carrier” in every DJ set I do (but never do it), and “acroyear2″ and “drane2″ are both utterly interesting. It’s overdone but completely accurate to say that “drane2″ is ball bearings dropping on guitar strings. “Under BOAC” sounds like an in-development version of “Maphive 6.1″ from EP7 with its fantastic enormous metal air-vent-sized bendy-straw percussion, “Corc” is wistful and lazy, and “Rae” is so good (check the amazing tempo change) it should almost be included in the list above.

As I said, I rarely hear LP5 because I’ve had it for forever now and I’m always trying to hear new things, and it doesn’t really mix with anything else. But, every once in a while, I’ll put it on and just lie back and listen. And those nights invariably end six hours later with the sky turning blue again, after I’ve heard everything they’ve done yet another time and remembered how good a choice I made when Autechre became my first favorite band.

The critical opinion of the album is very mixed, some calling it their best release ever, some saying it’s their best release in the last decade, others saying it continues their decline, and still others saying it’s starting a decline they didn’t have before. It’s definitely a strange release–the usual Ae album has a little less than twenty tracks, this has 20. Typically, they’re long and contain a lot of variations and subtle changes, here most songs are only three minutes or so and meditate on one idea. In every previous album, particularly the last few, the songs had obviously been meticulously constructed and composed, I’ve read elsewhere that these were improvised and simply “jammed” out.

My first thought was “This sounds like Amber.” I’m not sure whether or not that’s a good thing, since Amber is my least favorite Autechre LP. There are none of the spastic clicks and buzzes that have been present everywhere since Confield (though they had been toned down for Untilted, the previous release). In fact, there’s very little glitch at all. The opener, “Altibzz”, could be straight off a release of theirs in 1995. Lots of tracks sound like they were written by a slightly-more-abstract Ochre.

When my friend Dave played me a leak of Quaristice, which was the first time I’d heard it, I didn’t believe that it was actually Autechre. I said that it sounded like a very good imitation of Autechre, but not them. I stand by that sentiment as much as I can–the lack of composition really shows here. There are a lot of good ideas which aren’t developed as much as I know they can be by guys like this. It’s interesting that they get so far with just improv (though I don’t know how true that is), but it’s not far enough to match my expectations.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing good about this album–”plyPhon” and “rale” are great, and “Simmm” is maybe the best track they’ve released since Confield (my favorite of theirs; I’m sorry, not much can beat “VI Scose Poise”). There are a handful of other nice songs, as well. The problem here is the quality control: some tracks are aggravating, many are throwaway. I also don’t have the feeling this will improve with successive listens as each previous Autechre album has for me.

I guess in the end that I agree with people that say this is a natural place for them to go after Untilted hinted at it, and I’m glad they’re doing something new, but this is the first album of theirs where I feel like they haven’t tried as hard to make it good. At the moment I’m ranking it above Amber and Untilted, somewhere around Incunabula and Draft 7.30, and below their classic period between Tri Repetae and Confield, but we’ll see what happens as it ages.