By Brady Tackett

All of There Is Love in You, especially “Circle,” sounds like the alley behind a gas station with the dusk melting in pools of motor oil. The songs are little beauties hidden in settings you never thought to look.

 

The bump of dance music is here, but warm, strong and nearly unrecognizable. Four Tet, a.k.a. Kieran Hebden, has always culled interesting electronic music from a sea of eclectic rhythms and sounds, but Love is more focused. It’s the melodic light of his past work, refracted through years of experience.

And that experience is collective: Hebden’s mentor is legendary jazz drummer Steve Reid, who played with Miles Davis, James Brown and Fela Kuti. Hebden, clearly an apt pupil, benefits from all these influences. 

“This Unfolds” turns something of a Beck throwaway into Maynard James Keenan in space. The songs are eclectic but together in quiet shifts in tone. “Circling” has chopped vocals in an Afrobeat rhythm and a charming bell pattern. Everywhere, Love rescues childhood nostalgia from whimsy. 

Diverse as the Hebden’s sampled sources are, the glue of Love is a song structure unique to dance music. New sounds emerge right on beat. These songs forever add to themselves, building till the end of every song is a whirling, euphoric wave of sounds.

But from where did this newfound joy come? “Pablo’s Heart,” a 12-second recording of a child’s heartbeat recorded on a cell phone, is indicative of Love as a whole. It’s like a dance in celebration of new life. Maybe Hebden’s introspection has upgraded, expanded outwardly.