Jon Hopkins – Insides

Album Reviews • Wednesday June 17th, 2009 • 8:20 am

Jon Hopkins is a producer’s producer. He’s worked on Coldplay’s latest stuff, and collaborated with such ‘lectronic luminaries as Massive Attack, Imogen Heap, and Brian Eno. Any sound engineering student would give his left ear for a resumé like that. Despite all this, he has found the time to release a few solo records under his own name, Insides being the most recent. Mind you, the album is no vanity project. He’s proven he’s got chops behind the mixing board, but Insides proves his set of ears is more multifaceted.

The album splits the difference between noisy electronics and organic melody. Insides is awash with piano; it feels as though Hopkins sat in a room with only an upright and composed most of his pieces through before adding all the electronic bells and whistles. His playing is heavily influenced by minimalism, as well as that perennial favorite of electronic musicians the world over, Erik Satie. It’s got the repetitious melodic figures, but also the sense of space Satie suggests (see “Vessel” or “The Low Place”). It suits the music well; the acoustic instrument warms up the album, and the simplicity of Hopkins’ playing prevents the pieces from getting cluttered. Which could happen pretty easily on an album like this. Hopkins favors the Glitch style of beat making – each measure packed to the gills, stereo somersaults, stretching and twisting the original material – and the near-dissonant chaos of the rhythmic tracks are nicely tempered by the general prettiness of the other elements. “Insides” exemplifies this approach with its ethereal electronic bells and spacey chords against totally deconstructed rhythms.

He does, however, abandon some of his glitchy tendencies around the halfway mark of the album. When we hit “Light Through the Veins,” it becomes clear that the focus has shifted. The song is the album’s strongest piece; a nine-minute plus construction centered around a synth line right out of Eno’s Discreet Music. It takes its time, but is more than worth it for the patient listener. Hopkins expertly layers luminous chords, restrained beats, and fluttering melodies. This is what a producer does. The second highlight is “The Low Places.” Most of the songs on Insides are big, densely packed rooms. “The Low Places” is a small, spare one. Its beat could have been from a track Bjork left off of Vespertine, and Hopkins develops his melodic ideas around it but doesn’t allow the song to get too big for itself.

But as is the case with so much vocal-less electronic music, Insides sometimes sounds like it would be better suited to a soundtrack or to a car commercial than an attentive listen. When he discards his glitchy beats (which demand attention, for better or worse) and focuses more directly on melodic textures (in “A Drifting Up,” or the midpoint of “Colour Eye”) I can hear the ad execs at Ford licking their chops. Indeed, his stuff has appeared in commercials and other visual stimulants, and with good cause. And not to cheapen soundtrack music, either. But when an album “sounds like soundtrack music,” what you’re really saying is there fells like there ought to be some other point of attraction outside of the music itself.

And when Hopkins discards the electronics completely, he usually loses me. Two tracks toward the end of the record, “Small Memory” and “Autumn Hill” are solo piano pieces, which, while pretty, have no place on the record and are sequenced too close together. The other example that works much better than the aforementioned two is the lead-off track “The Wilder Son” which constructs a lovely violin drone and accompaniment. It’s well placed and more interesting than “Small Memory” or “Autumn Hill.”

But these are small complaints. Hopkins has put together a diverse and excellent album that gives the producer-as-musician as good name. Hopefully he’ll be able to tear himself away from Chris Martin’s claws long enough to give us more in the future.

Tagged as: electronic, UK