4 out of 5

Label: Nomark

Produced by: Amon Tobin

Looking forward; looking back. I’d listened to Amon Tobin’s Fear in a Handful of Dust upon release but, in a cluttered release schedule, didn’t have the mind or patience to place it within his discography. It was strikingly pleasing – accessible – but, leaning on the electro-acoustic style he’d be continuing to explore from this point onward, and purposefully sonically narrowed, neither as directly genre-shaking as ISAM or as narrative and weighty as Dark Jovian.

Revisiting it now, it’s almost hilariously clear how cleanly this plugs into Amon’s releases, retroactively making a straight line from his final (as of this writing) Ninja Tune recording and his rolling stream of pseudonymous and otherwise Nomark works.

Fear in a Handful of Dust is a great title, bringing to mind – to me – a micro and macro scale, aligning with a visual both descriptive and vague; this is all conceptually aligned with the music, which can occasionally be delicate, and precise, or massive and overwhelming, or sometimes relatively nondescript, with that latter bit being where I lose the thread at some points. There was an expressed goal to strip things down a bit, which definitely achieved a goal of pushing Amon to distill certain emotions and vibes, and then we get to hear how he can’t help but bring back in some beats and chaos as we go along, even if this is a generally beatless and gentle affair. But it’s the moments between that start and end where things can be a bit too open, or faceless.

Around that, though, we get classical “guitar” plunkings that look forward to Figueroa, which gets swirled with the atmospherics of ISAM. A self-check towards simplicity brings us the rather toothless and unidentifiable Pale Forms Run By, but then the Dark Jovian influence comes in to land us on a stunning A-side closer, Heart Of The Sun, which combines these variously experimental sides of Tobin into one all-timer.

The B-side benefits from this with more direct confidence and momentum kicking things off, skittery, jazzy IDM clatter sneaking its way into the background, and then a woozy piece of vocals-included groove on Fooling Alright.

The album closes leaning on ambience, and perhaps without much ceremony, but the exercise of exorcising excess feels completed: these tracks land as final thoughts, not vague ones.

A journey of an album, but one that leaves you eager to revisit, and also for what’s to come – another nice underline of its dualities.