| Some records are made for lazy, snowy Saturday afternoons; Bibio's fi is undoubtedly one such album. Adorned with a sticker bearing a kind review from Marcus Eoin of Boards of Canada, one might be able to guess what lies under the sleeve here, whose cover image is a low-angle, defocused shot of a tree against a dusk sky; Bibio has taken the sound of the early 70's tape recorder and coupled it with some of the most gorgeous guitar arrangements you're likely to hear anytime soon, in addition to exhibiting a particularly strong and surprising sense of detail. The seventeen tracks here, while each able to stand alone, sound best as a continuous whole, working in almost dream-like patterns of refrains and reprises, creating a gorgeous haziness like the orange light of the sun on late-afternoon rooftops, say. One of the more remarkable parts of the sound of fi is that, despite the degree of calculation revealed over several listens, it comes off with the casualness of someone in his room laying down ideas and fugues that are simply being channeled for posterity's sake. While all the songs are drenched in the now common DIY lo-fi aesthetic (the source of the title, I suspect), some reveal more detail than others, like "Puffer," whose warm rhythm line bespeaks the perfect laziness of long-awaited repose; the converse of that, perhaps, is "Wet Flakey Bark," whose simple two-chord shifts attain a stunning emotional effect through its thick processing, which makes the track sound like it was pulled from a forgotten 1/4" tape left to mold in a closet for a decade or two, reminding one of the beauty of decay and imperfection in much the same way that William Basinski did with his Disintegration Loops series. Apart from all this, however, the clear standout is "Lakeside", which traces a line through a folky guitar exercise, turning on a dime into a more brooding tune before a gentle swell of drums that ends much too soon, but is nonetheless perfect. The only place where Bibio may lose points here is the general lack of variation between tracks, but taken at face value, fi is a near-essential album for those with a proclivity for the sounds of nascent nostalgia. - Atmosphere |
1XLP/Out Of Print