Your Ear Knows Future [VINYL]

`Your Ear Knows Future' is the sophomore effort from Baikonour - aka Brighton's French-born Jean-Emmanuel Kreiger - a veritable one-man band whose debut `For the Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos` was a heady blend of space rock and electronica. Where that first record was indebted to prog and Krautrock, `Your Ear Knows Future''s only noticeable change in direction is the additional demployment of 80s indie textures. After a rumbling, would-be ominous `Intro', the opener `Shikarettes & Khukuris' bursts into life with a reverbed guitar strum that recalls prototype shoegazers A.R. Kane (the band for whom the term `Oceanic' was coined) quickly subsumed by Baikonour's familiar take on psychedelia. Most of the tracks are underpinned by this New Order/Jesus & Mary Chain jangle but all revert to a default prog vacuity: all Celestial Synths (TM), steady crescendos and other cod-mystical devices.

`Chiru' oscillates between cock-rocking riffs and instrumental passages that suggest 12-inch versions of Cure songs circa `Disintegration' or Mary Chain derivatives like The Cranes. Bridging the expanse between these two styles are some New Age atmospherics, and while the transitions are made with a fluidity and dynamism the track still strikes me as rather unsubtle in its showy eclecticism. While the quickie `Double Happiness Wholesale' vaguely resembles M83's synthesized shoegaze, `Ye Ama Piaooo!' meanders through several passages of meaningful moodiness -warped chimes, more ominous bass - before some thundering Hawkwind-esque one-chord guitars and Krautrock percussion courtesy of Lee Adams from Fujiya & Miyagi. Things peak and dip, swirl and chug like this for a good five minutes - and it's very nice but totally unsurprising. The beginning of `Summer Grass/Winter Warm' is almost redolent of Boards of Canada's cassette warped nostalgic dissonance, but glossier, texturally facile, and quickly drowned in sub-Vangelis synths. I have no problem listening to an album entirely comprising instrumentals but it says a lot to me that some of the tracks feel as if they are missing vocals. The very fact that the word `instrumental' comes to my head when listening to Baikonour - as opposed to, say, `track' - seems to suggest an absence or incompleteness.

Baikonour is certainly not the first electronica act to dabble with post-rock, prog, Krautrock or 80s indie - and while he may one of few to try them all at once - `Your Ear Knows Future' never feels like more than a sum of its constituent parts. While he renders his influences with obvious skill he employs the textures with a one-dimensional predictability. The layering of atmospherics is entirely underwhelming, chugging along with an unfulfilled sense of purposefulness; without enough rough edges to counter the consummate smoothness of the production. I can imagine some of this being knocked up in a BBC workshop under the remit: `make something really cosmic and dramatic sounding by Friday, please'. It's all very professional sounding, but there are no new ideas here - just the conviction that disparate music styles from the past automatically sound fresh when blended together. They may have done when `For the Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos' was released, they don't anymore. If Your Ear Knows Future - it isn't Baikonour.