Wink
HereHear
(Columbia/Ovum)
With his 1996 debut album Left Above The Clouds and single "Higher State Of Consciousness," Josh Wink marked himself as one of the front-runners for original electronic music coming out of the US. While his new album isn't particularly groundbreaking as a whole, it does stretch the boundaries of the genre a bit, as well as those conceptions about his personal style. While the fore-mentioned single, and his most recent (and AMP featured track) "Are You There?" were tracks mired in repetitive acid sounds and hypnotic beats, his newest release finds him jumping all over the board.
While the album starts off with fairly recognizable sounds (thumping beats, tweaked out acid lines), it soon breaks into strange new territory with drum and bass ("Young Again"), an almost industrial collaboration with Trent Reznor ("Black Bomb"), and female-backed trip-hop ("I'm On Fire" with Caroline Crawley, formerly of Shellyan Orphan). They are some nice experiments and, for the most part (the collaboration with Trent Reznor is more novelty than anything else), work well. Some of the tracks are kind of a stretch, but for the most part, this is a pretty good new release. It might mystify the fans of his old stuff a little, but it's good that he's keeping people on their toes.
Rating: 6.5
