Track Listing

1. Hands
2. She Moves She
3. First Thing
4. My Angel Rocks Back and Forth
5. Spirit Fingers
6. Unspoken
7. Chia
8. As Serious As Your Life
9. And They All Look Broken Hearted
10. Slow Jam

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53986 in Music
• Released on: 2003-05-06
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Four Tet is Kieran Hebden, and he has released eight albums between his solo Four Tet work and band efforts as Fridge. Rounds is a beautiful montage of shuffling percussion, piano, guitar and folktronic excursions. 10 tracks. Domino. 2003.

From URB Magazine
(Domino) After first introducing Four Tet on the album Dialogue, it was with the stunning follow-up Pause that Kieran Hebden really turned discerning electronic music heads all the way on. A lovely amalgamation of gentle hip-hop beats, obscure folk influences and music-making software found on the net, the album elicited endless accolades and even generated cheeky new genre tags like "folktronic." The resulting trajectory sent Hebden everywhere from tours with Radiohead and Madlib to remixes for the likes of Aphex Twin and Beth Orton (who’s recruited him to produce her next album). Somewhere in all of that sonic madness he found time to conjure up Rounds, which simultaneously builds and deconstructs the strides made with Pause, resulting in an even more organic blend of quiet but muscular compositions. Opening with the woozily beautiful warm-up "Hands," the album sounds like it was composed by a man in love, especially considering song titles like "She Moves Me" (an Asian-influenced plucked groove augmented by jagged guitar bursts and distant bells) and the sweet, heartfelt harp tones of "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth." Hebden’s sense of humor emerges on "Spirit Fingers" (possibly an homage to teen cheerleading flick Bring It On?), sounding like an army of sped-up mandolins madly carousing with a kinky sampler. This whimsical approach also lightens up "As Serious As Your Life," which dances on a funky guitar melody and a stilted jazz back beat. Closing on the peacefully epic "Slow Jam," Rounds proves that quiet is indeed the new loud.

Permanent Ink

Customer Reviews

yes
folktronic? call it what you will: this is a very good album.
very well put together - which is not always easy when your're mixing technology and natural instruments sounds

A Milestone
Rounds changed my life and the course of my musical maturation. It is profound in its minimalism. Its rhythms play out like jazz, its composition like hip-hop, and its sentiments read like ethnic and folk music in a combination I couldn't have imagined before hearing. Caught between electronica, jazz, hip-hop, and rock, when I came across "Rounds" it was exactly what I wanted to hear in music at that given time. Infinitely creative and approachable in its humble presentation, this album should be in every modern music lover's collection.

explores the possibilities of what music can be
Rounds is a work of sonic bricolage. Unlike lesser artists, Four Tet manages to combine a jumble of sounds into beautifully-interlocking, natural, immediately comprehensible music, without any kitsch or clubby insipidness. Rounds is amazing. Buy it.