Some Reviews with Jimmy For Reals: Babe Rainbow

Some Reviews with Jimmy For Reals: Babe Rainbow – Falling Apart

Posted by: Jimmy For Reals on September 13, 2014

It’s been a while, but Cameron Reed (aka Babe Rainbow) has re-emerged from the swirling fog of musical obscurity to bring us a beguiling album of drifting dreamscapes and melancholic whimsy. After releasing a brace of thoroughly disconcerting EP’s on Warp in 2010, it was starting to seem as though he might have been one of those inspired flashpoint producers who came to deliver vital missives in context of the scene at the time, only to disappear once the moment had passed. Thankfully this isn’t the case, and on the strength of Falling Apart, as well as news of another LP to come in September, it seems pretty safe to say that he’s here to stay.

Apparently Reed has been filling the intervening time with a variety of projects, including touring as part of How to Dress Well’s live band, and at some point along the way the anxious, micro-dissected sounds of Shaved and the looming discord of Endless Path have given way to a sound probably best described as dream suites played by a diminutive synth orchestra. His music has always seemed as though it has been painstakingly constructed in miniature detail, like tiny self-contained worlds, before being projected through a magnifying glass so can you admire all the exquisite details in high definition, and Falling Apart is no exception.

Its all pretty great, but particular highlights are the Susumu Yokota-esque recursive echoes of Plucks, Swept Stairs with its twinkling synths and wandering bassline and the urgently pulsing Things that were not, which sounds like the soundtrack to something beautiful yet unbearably tragic. For me though the crowning moment of the album comes with The Bells, which combines miniaturised percussion with an unexpected tropical slide guitar interlude and the sort of exultant strings that wouldn’t be out of place in a concerto celebrating the arrival of springtime after a long cold winter.

Falling Apart is out now on Kinky Beggar