3 out of 5

Label: Ninja Tune

Producer: Amon Tobin

Some artists go through notable shifts in their career, and when they hang around long enough they start to swing back and forth, incorporating elements from their various eras.  But I love when there’s a clear progression from start to finish for musicians.  Amon Tobin’s path from Cujo to the ISAM is like a story.  You can tell people the conclusion and get a proper eyebrow waggling response, but it makes that much more of an impact when they hear it from beginning to end.  It helps that those first few “pages” are interesting as well.

‘Bricolage’ is very obviously early in Tobin’s career.  Once you’ve sampled his later sound based work and his jungle stuff and his beat stuff, the wandering, funkier nature of ‘Bricolage’ pegs this as introductory Tobin, the kind of work that’s most fitting for Ninja Tune (where the beats are generally fun and funky… they totally scored with Tobin, one of the most thoughtful and purposeful artists in their catalogue).  But, what makes this a more rewarding listen than ‘Adventures in Foam’ is the way it percolates with Amon’s already (at that point) bustling creativity, starting with some interesting jazz-funk competitions before dropping a beat-based track (‘Chomp Samba’) that would hint at his direction and then slipping into laid-back IDM-influenced groove for the remainder of the disc.  But through it all, though the compositions wane on a bit too long and don’t quite evolve, there’s the sense of the artist struggling with the confines, and trying to figure out how to work the genre into something more instead of resting on the ability to get one to nod their head.

The touted jazz influence of ‘Bricolage’ isn’t really that prevalent, to me, beyond some repeated themes throughout the disc, and I will admit it would’ve been interesting to have seen Amon go further in that direction instead of world beat, but dating this back to its time of electronica and groove, Amon was certainly on the cusp of these developments.  But listened to today, it’s more relevant in terms of his works than as a standalone listen.  It would take him another album to find a way to make a more lasting mark and truly carve out a signature style.