Album Review: Simian Mobile Disco - Unpatterns

When one half of Manchester indie quartet Simian broke away to form Simian Mobile Disco in 2005, no one knew what to expect. Needless to say no one was prepared when Jas Shaw and James Ford unleashed Attack Decay Sustain Release in 2007. After that big, wobbly distorted punch to the guts, the pair flipped the dirty tech on its head with Temporary Pleasure and enlisted a range of cracking vocalists such as Beth Ditto and Jamie Lidell to give the tracks a more accessible pop sheen. Now, with Unpatterns, Simian Mobile Disco find themselves at a crossroads, the album neither here nor there and sounding unrecognisably beige for it.

The aural equivalent of 50 minutes in the k-hole, I Waited For You immediately puts you quivering in the corner of the room, the track bleeding into Cerulean to create a dark and minimal opener that aptly sets the tone for the rest of the album. That's not to say the record is without its dance-oriented moments, bouncy mid-album number, Interference, showing a bit more life, but it does so with polite refrain. For the most part, however, it is electronic wankery, indulgent and flat rhythms that encourage nothing more than the odd bit of chin stroking.

Unpatterns holds its moments of intrigue, but predominantly it's a strange, foreign album. It seems like every time you try and pin down Jas Shaw and James Ford, they wriggle out from underneath your fingers. In the past, this has created some explosive results. Unfortunately this time, all it's done is produce a record that feels alien and cold.