3 out of 5

Label: Ninja Tune

Producer: Amon Tobin

As a step toward ‘Isam,’ Foley Room is already a pretty big leap from Tobin’s jungle / jazz beat stuff.  But since it is a bridge between styles, it’s also inadvertently limited, Amon adding beats that don’t feel as organic as his usual fare and letting some moments ring out to play with the naturalistic sound but sacrificing the solidity of particular songs.

Foley sounds are those effects in movies that have to be recreated in a studio, and a Foley Room is, let’s say, the room where that happens.  And so Tobin’s desire for this album to go out and record found sounds and turn them into songs, trying to find a line between ambient and something that makes us do stuff on the dance floor.  (‘Us’ not including me.  I’m standing, judgmentally, on the sidelines.  No, no, I’m having a good time – you go and dance.  Ha ha, yes, that’s right, this smile is totes legit.)  The album succeeds at length, but it takes a while to ramp up, sounding, appropriately, like some of Tobin’s score work – Infamous comes to mind, with its junk percussion – but when leaving room for some of his contributing artists, such as Kronos Quartet, to whom I’ll attribute opener ‘Bloodstone’s string, the tracks lose the flow and momentum that’s marked almost all of Amon’s stuff.  We progress to ‘Esther’S’, with its more mechanical background, and the idea becomes more apparent but its still in an experimental state.  His newness to this particular blending of elements also introduces a new, unfortunate kink: the sequencing from track to track is choppy.  Overall, the album definitely feels more laidback toward the start before hitting ‘Kitchen Sink’ at track 5, which matches its name, and then stays at a good medium pitch until the suddenly funky ‘Big Furry Head’ carries us through some amazing stuff to the end of the disc.  But all of ‘Isam’ – and Tobin’s catalogue – can be marked by a very smooth progression between songs, and that gets lost on ‘Foley’.

But if it all sounds negative, that’s only because Amon has set such a high bar during his career.  Once ‘Foley’ does hit that midpoint, its pretty blazing stuff, notes different from his previous work (see the catchy and yet devilish sounding ‘Always’) but slotting in with the highpoints in his funk eras.  Even the album’s beginning that I dissect is fascinating and original in the electronic world, and going chronologically through Amon’s stuff it would’ve been more of an impact, but I heard ‘Isam’ first which is the concept of this album fully realized.

‘Foley Room’ is, I suppose, the least classifiable album in AT’s history up to this point.  Not that any of his stuff is clearly one thing or another, but you can recommend a particular album based on that it leans toward funk, or jazz, or whatever.  ‘Foley’ swings back and forth too much to satisfy on any particular front and only really succeeds (notable beyond its concept) when it slips back into beat-making.  It was a necessary step in Tobin’s career, but also evidence of his perpetual learning from the past to make a better next album.