REVIEW: BOOM BIP – ZIG ZAJ

If Boom Bip’s recent collaboration with the Super Furry Animal’s Gruff Rhys, Neon Neon, demonstrated a growing pop sensibility, then Zig Zaj represents a consolidation into further melodic territory.

Largely instrumental, and highly attuned to the mechanics of song writing, it is an album that has a flighty commitment to genre, slipping between sprawling electronic dirges such as ‘Automaton’ to the near-radio-friendly indie rock of ‘Goodbye Lovers’.

This eclecticism is nothing new of itself: Boom Bip’s sublime second album Blue Eyed in the Red Room incorporated a wide range of instrumentation into his electronic work, and underpinned it with a sweeping emotional pathos.
It is unfortunate then that Zig Zaj fails to do much in the way of progressing this formula, instead the listener is left with an album that feels a touch on the safe side. The risks are minor, small fractal shifts rather than tectonic calamities, and though this is not problematic in general, here it leads to an overall sense of listlessness.

There are a few significant moments: closing track ‘Mascot and The Moth’ is divinely dense and otherworldly, while ‘Manabozh’ sounds like Wizzard being fed into a threshing machine. Boom Bip’s confidence around songwriting is prevalent throughout, nothing feels resolutely out of place, and perhaps this is why Zig Zaj fails to stick. Its attitude is one of accomplishment, but not of pointing further than its own confines. This is decidedly signposted by the fairly conservative choice of collaborators: the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand may be a lot of things, but he is certainly not a bastion of uncompromising avant-garde sensibility.

It would be generous to suggest that Boom Bip is digging in before a push, that this refinement of technique is precisely that, rather than a conservative gesture. It is possible, though difficult to judge until placed next to whatever is to come, and in the meantime the listener must console themselves with what remains a good album, even if it is not a particularly remarkable one.

Words: Andrew Spragg

Filed under: Reviews by D.K.