Bonding by the 'campfire'

For three anxious years Boards of Canada fans have anticipated the follow-up to 2002's highly praised Geogaddi, and the wait should come with much satisfaction. The Campfire Headphase is a beautifully nostalgic album, striking an eerie familiarity in the listener that evokes sounds and images of a forgotten time. The Scottish electronic music duo has an admitted fascination with reminiscence, and The Campfire Headphase successfully articulates this fascination. The fuzzy, intentionally aged photographs of faceless people that litter the album's sleeves perfectly complement the hauntingly mysterious, warm analog sounds Boards of Canada mastered long ago with their 1998 cult classic, Music has the Right to Children. \nThe Campfire Headphase finds Boards of Canada taking their first notable steps toward progressing their sound, as seen through the incorporation of sampled guitar and other non-synthetic sounds heard on tracks such as the wonderfully transcendent "Satellite Anthem Icarus." Despite broadening their range of instrumentation, the sounds have been processed in typical Boards of Canada fashion, keeping laptop purists thoroughly satisfied, while making The Campfire Headphase the most accessible Boards of Canada album to date. \nThe album begins with the ambient interlude "Into the Rainbow Vein," its swells of synthetic melancholia then bleed into "Cromakey Dreamcoat." "Dreamcoat" sets the overall vibe for the rest of the album as its relaxed, mid-tempo hip-hop beats mesh with sweeping synthesizers, phased-out guitars and thickly layered atmospherics that are distinctly Boards of Canada. Following "Dreamcoat," the sounds of crashing waves are joined by an acoustic guitar/beat-drop combination that is as reminiscent of Beck as it is of Boards of Canada. As the track progresses, slightly detuned instruments seemingly dulled by the passage of time are continuously layered into the mix, creating a strikingly beautiful soundscape never heard before on a BoC release. The bulk of the album consists of typical BoC material as "Satellite Anthem Icarus" sounds as if it were assembled from the soundtrack of a 70s Nova documentary. The album's pace is debatably lazy, but this is the only weakness one may find in The Campfire Headphase. In past releases, BoC found ways to lull you into a trance only to be disrupted moments later by some kind of primal onslaught of synthetic rage. There are no ragers in The Campfire Headphase, just tranquil explorations into one's own consciousness. What the album lacks in energy it surely makes up for in composition as The Campfire Headphase has some of the most tangible BoC compositions to date. Well worth the wait, I must say.