Album Review: Boards Of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest

Quick, think of your favourite sci-fi film or book. Ender's Run, Blade Runner, Tron, Wall-E, whatever. Now, think of the soundtrack; either the one built into it, or the one you imagined in your head. Now throw it out. It's gone. This, this is the new sci-fi soundtrack to rule over all sci-fi soundtracks.

Boards Of Canada are nothing if not mysterious, progressive and intuitive. Their work, spanning four albums and countless short-format releases over two decades, has always been intriguing, if not only for the sheer ballsiness of their apparent flaunting of the generic rules of electronic music. As always with BoC, there's no shortage of weird on Tomorrow's Harvest: effects units are pitted against each other is some form of sonic gladiatorial combat, resulting in gravity-defying composition. The eventual flow through the first three tracks of the album – Gemini, Reach For The Dead and White Cyclosa – match the same metronome-steady beat (very Mass Effect-ish, for you nerds out there) against a fluid and ever-changing layer of gradual warping and distortion of melody. If you're looking for something with more bite, Cold Earth truly jacks up the future-ness, with a hooky, wonky beat twisted through vacuum-chamber refrains. Palace Posy could almost be normal, if it wasn't shoved octaves out of tune in wonderful ways; Nothing Is Real is lounge music on Venus.

Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison have stated how important film soundtracks had been in creating Tomorrow's Harvest before, but you have to hear it to realise just how true that is. Everything about it – the sound, the title, hell, even the cover art – screams science fiction. Whether you agree with that admittedly dorky notion or not, you can't disagree that Tomorrow's Harvest is a journey.