Boards of Canada - Trans Canada Highway

I got to listen to two of the tracks from The Boards' forthcoming EP this afternoon, as well as checking out the video to new single Dayvan Cowboy.

I have to say that I've been a little non-plussed by their work after Music Has the Right to Children and the EP which followed that: Geogadddi was fairly anal and Campfire Headphase was unfortunately just a bit boring.

Trans Canada looks like it has the chance of being a kind of upswing, but maybe not in the direction you might initially expect. Dayvan Cowboy itself is closer to Amon Tobin than anything else - sampled, retriggered drums over a modulated looping guitar motif. It does have a typically disjointed Boardsy melody which plonks along over the top, but the swelling strings and other sampled sounds really do lend it a bit of a Ninja Tune feel.

I also have that nagging furniture advert feeling when I'm listening to it - it's so different from the wackiness that characterised Music Has the Right. There's no dorky time signatures or, perhaps more interestingly, unidentifiable sounds to be had here: if you were being cruel you could make a crack about library music.

That's not strictly fair- it's a nice tune and I'm happy to listen to it: there's no grating, over-processed nonsense; some of the drum programming is superbly intricate; the spacey, drifting feel is a different direction for Sandison and Eoin and a not entirely unwelcome one.

The video is a tad disappointing, mostly consisting of cut-up shots of water and some guy surfing. Yay.

Skyliner, the second track on the promo, seems a little half-hearted. The pads and pitch modulation from earlier days are right back at the centre, as are the little elliptical drum patterns, and occasional single notes with a very long attack time: it's totally unambitious and doesn't really seem to fit with the direction Dayvan Cowboy wants to take. There's even some slightly irritating dub echoes just to make you feel all the worse for listening to it - it's just filler.

Here's hoping that the finished product will have a positive weighting in the Dayvan Cowboy direction when it comes out on the 6th of June (yes, 06/06/06 - because every black metal band hasn't already scheduled their release for then - oh dear).