In 2013, the marketing campaign for Boards of Canada's triumphant return to music had me feeling the most excited I had ever been about anything. (well, that and the one for Yeezus, which in the end came out a week later). It involved a ridiculous but fun ARG dependent on fans finding six different records with a unique number station recording, which, when combined, spelled out a 36-digit code that was to be entered on a mysterious website. I don’t think all six of them were ever found in the wild, but eventually the code was uncovered and the website revealed the cover art for the duo’s new record, titled Tomorrow’s Harvest.
It was impossible not to notice an incongruity when Tomorrow’s Harvest was placed as a hypothetical object against the rest of their discography. Rather than a saturated, distorted view of the natural or humanoid vesseled through half-memory, its cover boasted what seemed to be a contemporary photograph of San Francisco taken from the barren, cold grounds of the Alameda runway; the rounded edges of their previous typefaces were sanded down and made sharp; even the title of the album - Tomorrow’s Harvest - was lacking in heady nonsense, and in fact was diametrically opposed to nostalgia. It looked foreboding, apocalyptic, oddly real.
So I was initially disappointed when I first got my fifteen-year-old hands on Tomorrow’s Harvest, with the album’s artistic direction pointing to the modern day and confirming my initial assumptions that they were doing something uncharacteristically grounded. They removed entirely the chilled whimsy of their Campfire Headphase, and, while not entirely doing away with them, reduced the prevalence of their trademark warm and warbly synth timbres which first drew me to “roygbiv” or “Music Is Math” years before. Now they offered a record which, while not without chutzpah, demanded a fuller attention and an embrace of a crypticness which seemed less akin to Geogaddi’s (their masterpiece) shot-on-16 occult obsession and closer to interrogating the secrets of the military-industrial complex, climate change, or something like that. It sounded like the band came to view their attractive, uncanny retroness largely as a crutch, made obvious by the opening “Gemini’s” bait-and-switch: a retro synth boot-up becomes a viscous slurry of comparably hi-fi synths which waste no time pulling the listener down like quicksand.
Nowadays, its incongruity is partly why I think Tomorrow’s Harvest is among their best records and certainly better than Campfire which preceded it, which is too eager to reminisce, to kick back and drop out. It showed the Board of Canadians willing to realign (perhaps even modernize) and produce something which could be offputtingly discordant to fans but not completely alienating nor uncaptivating. Nothing on the 2013 record indicates that they had lost any of their production-writing prowess - in fact, it was the opposite: tracks like “Reach for the Dead,” “Come to Dust,” “New Seeds,” “Jacquard Causeway” and even the throwback track “Nothing Is Real” et al rank among their most intricate and thoughtful. Maybe their view of the future was pessimistic, but it gave them the energy to create something bold, and hopefully more. Maybe they would even tour, I thought.
Then they disappeared for another thirteen years.
The harvest was reaped long ago, and it’s easy to be unhappy, isolated, susceptible. So, just as Geogaddi was influenced by the first world’s cruel reality check on September 11th, it was immediately understandable why Boards of Canada’s next record would be titled Inferno and why it would have the group once again aestheticizing religious fervor and the cultish, appearing to be the spiritual follow-up to their best record. But what we have with Inferno is weaker than what came before, and, worse, proves an artistic regression.
Inferno’s mood-setting prelude takes the form of retro arpeggiated synths which deliberately evoke the jingles that’d accompany a network logo, segueing into a real song in “Prophecy at 1420MHz.” After an initial flare of ominous canyon flute, it lays bare the album’s intentions over analog patches which come dangerously close to synthwave-style pastiche, retreating into the safe zone which they had carved out in ‘95 and saw further excavated by every pale imitator since. A minute or so into track, we’re presented the album’s distinguishing musical element - Geogaddi had darkness, Campfire had guitar, Harvest had restraint, Inferno has vocals. A distorted but legible voice speaks to the listener phrases which we can easily imagine a Koresh or a Jones or an Applewhite-like: “I am God / The Ultimate Resonance / The Spirit / I am the Soul / et cetera.” Ah, Inferno. Hell, I suppose.
You can levy the accusation that Boards of Canada have never been one for subtle imagery and evocation: “Everything You Do Is a Balloon,” “Into the Rainbow Vein,” “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” are grinningly druggy, and even the previous album had tracks fittingly titled “Palace Posy,” “Sundown” and “Collapse,” but now the duo are content to literally talk at us: much of the record matches “Prophecy’s” obviousness with a catalog of esoteric samples which are outward-facing and unobscured. Samples from old films and TV or the odds and ends of radio etc. are not unfamiliar territory for the band, but whereas previous albums used them - on the occasions where they were intelligible - to capture a mood, the outer edges of a zeitgeist (“Dandelion”), Inferno gives us its samples as narrative in itself. “Father and Son” is a piece where offputtingly-rendered and paranoid vocal chops - sourced from a 70s documentary about a religious cult - reign, and with its electronic instrumentation it’s difficult to not hear the track as a synthesized version of The Books (“The Word Becomes Flesh” eliciting the same). “The Process” places the sounds of unrest aside the stilted voice of an artificial woman; “Naraka” (my favorite on the album) utilizes a cut-up Hare Krishna as a central element; “Age of Capricorn” espouses echoey esoterica.
Not to say that Inferno is wholly vocal, because many of the tracks are instrumental or instrumental-likes - often though their composition suggests revisitation, the renewing of vows, a fifth-generation dub polished and polished again. Most striking to me was the closing track “I Saw Through the Platonia,” which bears fantastic resemblance to its spiritual forefather’s closer “Corsair.” “Hydrogen Helium…” could’ve been workshopped from “The Beach at Redpoint” or “Sunshine Recorder”; “Deep Time’s” upper-range titter-tatter is not totally unlike “New Seeds”; and moody interludes like “Memory Death” would not have been unfamiliar on Geogaddi if its synths were played back on a dying reel.
Even ignoring its self-reflex, I don't find anything on the new album which hits as hard as "Come to Dust" or "Reach for the Dead" does, nothing purely oppressive as "Gyroscope," as hypnotizing as "Zoetrope" or "Open the Light," nothing reaching the confused wonder found in "Dawn Chorus" or "Turquoise Hexagon Sun," nor the inventiveness and bittersweet nostalgia of "Julie and Candy." Nothing is bad - it's good all the way through, even - but nothing stands out among their best either.
Despite my hangups, I think Inferno still ranks above Campfire, which is the record of theirs I visit least often. But I find it a shame that after the relative groundedness of Tomorrow’s Harvest that they’d not just go back to nostalgic headiness (of a jaded variety) but that they're ready to play it more blatantly than ever. We saw it in all the marketing materials: VHS tapes being sent to fans, a promotional video which is ridden with scanlines and interlacing, a Robert Beatty-directed video rife with images you might half-remember seeing projected on an overhead in science class, the album's cover boasting in large, glowing, tube-like type their name and title superimposed over a collage of Super-8 stills, presumably sourced from home movies and cultish instructional films. Inside the grooves easter eggs abound - indeed fans have already found many - but intrigue is missing. We hear psychedelic cliche in canyon flutes and sitar and Hare Krishnas, and the thematic heavy-handedness of it all feels, ironically, like they have little faith in us.
I’ve come to enjoy the new record a few days and listens in, and have been listening to it a lot. Boards of Canada are foundational to me and my love of music and art in general, and I’ll probably always be excited whenever they’re nice enough to crawl out of their bunker somewhere to release something. When I was fourteen I found the photobook edition of their second album at a record store and felt like I was handling a thousand carats. If they ever tour, I’ll buy a ticket wherever. I’ll see them twice. I’ll trudge through Edinburgh charity shops to find copies of their early cassettes and CDrs until there’s nowhere else for me to go. The only fault of theirs which I find particularly egregious is that they still haven’t given us a studio version of their insane Warp10 closer or a soundboard version of the live “Julie and Candy,” which is so good that I have to listen to it at least twice whenever I think of it.