Like any other Boards of Canada fan, I've eagerly awaited this album for years, checking the internet regularly for any remours concerning the release of this long-anticipated album. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the album did not come out in my part of Canada until a week later. This afforded me the opportunity to check the reviews of the album, and prepare myself.
All I heard of the album so far was "Reach for the Dead." Though it possessed some beautiful moments, it
certainly was a far-less compelling foretaste of the album than I could have hoped for. It certainly paled in memory of most older BoC tracks. Reading through the reviews online I could find that there were indeed a fair number of people unimpressed with the whole album at large. They were a minority opinion (indeed, a significant minority), but I was more inclined to believe them.
Why? For starters, BoC possesses a fan base among whose members comprise people that in many ways best represent the concept of "Religion of Brand;" they are Religious fanatics in the most modern sense. They dissect every track in a manner befitting a medieval scholastic; they're anticipation of this new album, as alluded to elsewhere, was akin to the second coming of Christ (or third, if you've actually read the New Testament; or fourth, if you're a mormon). Their defence of Tomorrow's Harvest on sites such as amazon.com almost makes a pace of Monty Python, "every song is sacred," more than an apt joke. I must admit I've indulged in some of this behaviour myself.
Accordingly, once I purchased the album, I was more sceptical of it than any album I had bought in recent memory.
Listening to it initially, I could only feel reminded of Vangelis' "L'apocalypse des animeaux," which is unusual, since I can't consciously remember anything of that album. That album was certainly not Vangelis' best work, and all I could feel was that this would not be BoC's best work, either. Indeed, the feeling that dominated me throughout the listening was that "Tomorrow's Harvest" simultaneously sounded more modern than previous albums, and yet more dated.
While "L'apocalypse des animeaux" is an actual movie soundtrack from the early 1970's, Tomorrow's Harvest definitely sounds like the soundtrack to an unreleased movie, completed a range going from the made to the unfinished to the unmade in my record collection (the middle being the Uncle Meat soundtrack). A number of the pieces work, if only taken in the vein of a soundtrack; and indeed mixed with the artwork one does receive a sense of the apocalyptic. Having said that, being a good soundtrack doesn't make it a good album.
As other reviewers have pointed out, many of the tracks do not elicit an emotional response. There are tracks that do, which I have listed below in my standouts. That emotional response, ultimately, is nostalgia, which is not necessarily a good thing. BoC has always succeeded by tapping into nostalgia, but that was nostalgia of popular culture from bygone days. The best offerings from Tomorrow's Harvest are nostalgia for Boards of Canada.
Having said that, it is still not a bad album. The tracks that are good are really good, while the theme of the album is strong, and compensates for the weakness of individual tracks (like a real album should). It may not be the place to start listening to BoC (in my opinion that honour falls to Geogaddi), but it is still respectable.
Now, having written all this, I just want to posit and hypothesis. That hypothesis is this: BoC's fanbase has actually dampered the creativity of Boards of Canada. How so? There is a saying I will now poorly restate, that brilliance is a product of strife. Another is that necessity is the mother of invention. Boards of Canada were able to produce wonderful, innovative albums in a relatively short time when they were young and insecure. Having gained security, they were able to retreat even further out of the limelight. Few bands can say that their fanbase has grown over their years of inactivity (My Bloody Valentine, perhaps?) and it is because of this that they could go on for almost a decade doing relatively little. I believe that were their fans less fanatical, they might have been compelled to do something sooner, and it would have probably been better.
Standouts: Sick Times, Split Your Infinities, Nothing is Real, Sundown, New Seeds
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