“C-Town Smash” is once more a vaguely embarrassing bit of anecdotal bass-flopping in front of a seemingly live audience. I can’t figure out if it’s some kind of valuable, self-reflexive philosophy that allows Squarepusher to sample so heavily from his earlier work, or if he’s just lazy, and that’s the problem facing this record.
It’s still scary and sexy, just a bit more garish here. I swear, this is the track “Hard Normal Daddy” with heavy make-up on. The sounds eventually turn into “Hard Normal Daddy”. Okay, the sixth track, “Menelee”, starts off by returning to Jenkinson’s affection for Indonesian Gamelan drumming that he flirted with on Budakhan Mindphone. However, where the earlier version felt intriguing, this is a truly brilliant track now. “50 Cycles” is essentially a vastly improved version of that weird, anti-pop robotic British rap song from Do You Know Squarepusher. It’s interesting, but not as perverse as “Tomorrow World”. This time around it’s analog acid jazz drum loops and squiggly bass from his live sessions, fused to the sizzling hard-drive force of his mastery in electronic invention. “Iambic 9 Poetry” is easily slotted into Squarepusher’s Selection 16 phase, commonly referred to as his “not-quite fusing fusion”. The second track, “I Fulcrum”, is a freshly-boiled serving of noodling straight from the bucket of Music Is Rotted One Note, only now with sounds of a live crowd going a bit hyperbolic over Jenkinson’s ability to slap bass. The opening track, “Ultravisitor”, is a pretty decent old-style bag of steeping percussion that squeals for a while and then cools down, and sort of tastes like Hard Normal Daddy with a lot of Feed Me Weird Things added. Here’s a breakdown of how the album goes: So, while Ultravisitor is still a great listen, it’s going to be hard for any picky fan not to feel a little peeved by some of the glaringly abundant derivations from earlier work. But it’s easy to see the popular achievement of Ultravisitor as a “leap” when you’ve dismissed the last few albums. I think what’s happened is that a certain generation of critics has finally caught on to what Squarepusher is up to, and Ultravisitor synthesizes so many of his disparate musical efforts that it’s hard not to be charmed by the confidence. It is by far the most demanding, hilarious, structurally superb, and textured album Jenkinson has ever released, and Ultravisitor would be almost as impressive if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that the album isn’t quite original. It could be the most significant album he’s ever released. It’s meant that Go Plastic is still living in this critical vacuum that runs completely opposite to public tastes. Because of this weird, enduring obsession with one Squarepusher album, a lot of his visible advancements in technique and structure have gone unnoticed for having been done with computers. The minority view among early critics about Music Is Rotted One Note has now become the norm. Yet, that hasn’t stopped critics from lamenting the entire rest of his career for its return to the digital domain. People thought it was interesting, but rather immature, and didn’t stack up to the leading electro-acoustic improvisers of the day. People wanted more massive bpm and funky bass, not analog drums and fusion jazz nonsense. I keep reading reviews where people are essentially saying, “Why can’t he go back to his crazy fusion music like Music Is Rotted One Note?” But when that album came out, the reviews were awful. People talk now about that stylistic transition Squarepusher made with Music Is Rotted One Note as if the prevailing tenor of the time was in synch with today’s voices in the declaration of the album as a masterpiece. I have all Squarepusher’s albums, and I rarely agree with the early reviews of each album, which have been mostly negative.
Which is what’s really frustrating for me, because I really wanted this to be my opportunity to applaud and encourage the overwhelmingly creative and innovative output of Britain’s Tom Jenkinson. Maybe I’m wrong, because no one else seems to be picking up the vibe that Ultravisitor is mostly an album of cheesy live jams and really heavily messed-up versions of songs from previous releases. I’m not sure this is an album of original material.
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