Troubleman : Time out of mind (Farout Recordings)

It's a long way from the English countryside and Mark Pritchard's Devon base to Brasil. It's a long way from the new millennium back to the 1960s. Yet Mark Pritchard manages to make the long roads seem like inches with this long-awaited debut album as Troubleman.

There's no initial suprise as Mark unleashes his trademark tight jumped-up funk right away with Have a good time. But we then sink deep down into the beautifully haunting cavernous echo that is Paz, an accoustically driven slow bossa gem with Nina Miranda on vocals. Nina imports more from her Smoke City days than her Da Lata collaborations on this one and the background vocals will remind fans of anything slightly cocktail of the melody pattern from Barry Adamson's Lost Higway contribution Something wicked this way comes. Paz is then wonderfully reprised in reverse for the closing track Zap...

From there on, Time out of mind becomes a wonderful trip on several levels -from a psychedelic trip to an organic voyage into the purest enjoyment. The righteous path is in the psychedelic ballpark, with vibes over a chorus-effect bassline and a crisp classic drum sequence -putting it somewhere between a lounge-era David Axelrod and Thievery Corporation, but with a sound that is more alive and vibrant -and augmented by a wonderful Mancini-style string and choir suite.

The minute you hear the first notes of Roll on, you know it's gonna sneak up on you, with it's devious rock bassline underpinning Eska's heartfelt vocals and a beautiful background chorus shaping the melody. It's incredible how Mark manages to leave so much space and air between the instruments and sound while forging the song into a unbreakable whole. If only the Brand New Heavies had sounded like this...

Lonely girl has more than a hint of Burt Bacharach and Antonio Carlos Jobim, with its cheeky little 60s cocktail bossa melody. Already a club favorite, Toda Horas starts out as a pleasant little samba rhythm before breaking into a restrained but intricately driving break. Steve Spacek supplies his tested style of whisper-soft vocals to complement the orchestral synths on the delectably peaceful slow soul of Without you.

The absolute apex of Time... is the phenomenal title track. A cinematic orchestral intro cuts into a speeding freight train of broken electro tech beats so deep that they rival everything that's ever come out of Detroit's occasional tendency to go broken -and draw out memories of Mark Pritchard's Jedi era with Tom Middleton. A brilliantly atmospheric synth floats suggestively in the background, creating an enigmatically rich tapestry of sound with a great mid-song stop/start break. This one is a sure shot for the all-time electronic music hall of fame...

Fans will recognise the deserved club hit Change... (is what we need), which is as good as ever and in retrospect, served as an omen for the bossa style of the album. But by the time you get to Strike hard (and realise the similarity with Thievery Corporation's Focus on sight), this otherwise excellent track looks comparatively weak when seen in the light of the entire album. That's the essence of what this album does -it take Mark Pritchard's music to new heights so unexpected that previous gems pale in tandem with the birth of new starts on this album.

Time... a mix of many things heard before, all refined to excellence as Mark cements his own sound that shows itself to be so much more than we ever predicted. The music is meticulously produced, yet shines with an effortless ease and a wonderful lightness -a capacity to integrate electronic production and live instrumentation smoothly and seemlessly to create something sublime. Time.. takes you from up to down and through every station in between with a wonderful ease and pleasure that is almost impossible to explain.

And as you will have realised by now, we found it very difficult to review this album. Time... is one of those precious few albums that you can't quite get your head around, yet the pleasure of listening is so great that it doesn't matter anyway. The experience makes sense not through any logical album analysis but through experiencing the emotion and passion that is abundant within the melodies and rhythms. This is the kind of music that shouldn't be analysed or put into genres. It should simply be enjoyed...

Time out of mind is timeless, vibrant, fresh, organic and simply a wonderful album.

Review by Nicolai Hartvig

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