Boards of Canada Freak Me Out

As I write this, I'm reclining in an orchard on a farm, basking in the sun on a warm afternoon in late spring. My girlfriend's dog is lying at my feet and children are taking horseback riding lessons at the adjacent barn. (Here's the scene.) I ought to be ecstatic or, at the very least, pretty damn relaxed. Instead, there's a faint sense of existential unease tugging at my mind that has everything to do with the fact that I'm listening to Tomorrow's Harvest, the latest album from Boards of Canada.

The Scottish electronic duo has always had this effect on me. The first time I heard the band's seminal 1998 debut, Music Has the Right to Children, I was overwhelmed with loneliness. Not the feeling of self-pity that comes from spending a Friday evening in front of the tube. I'm talking about the all-consuming solitude of a stranded cosmonaut who has lost contact with Major Tom and stares down at the Earth while floating helplessly through nothingness.

The beats were cold and mechanical, and the fragile synthesizers warbled ever so slightly in and out of tune. The music was entirely instrumental, but a faint babble of computerized voices would emerge from time to time, hovering just under the surface, as if I could hear robots taking in the next room. Ostensibly, the album is about childhood, but I found it freakishly alien and about a million times more terrifying than the blackest of black metal, despite being sublimely beautiful.

The mood on Tomorrow's Harvest is similarly dark and alluring. Following the brief, tongue-in-cheek blast of synth-horns that introduces the first track, "Gemini," the iconic IDM act does what it does best: conjuring up desolate worlds with a haze of retro-futurist synthscapes, tense drones and flickering rhythms. "Jacquard Causeway" is a particular standout, its brassy synth reminding me of everything that was captivating and unsettling about Music Has the Right to Children.

This isn't a simple retread -- as early reviews have pointed out, the duo are perhaps a little more groove-oriented this time around. The drums on the aforementioned "Jacquard Causeway" are harsh and lurching, while there's a hip-hop undercurrent to the start-stop rhythms of "Nothing Is Real," and a sense of tribal urgency in the uncharacteristically buoyant "Palace Posey." That said, nothing comes too far out of left field -- this is the Boards of Canada we know and love.

Will this record continue to haunt me in the way that Music Has the Right to Children has? I'll need a little more time to figure that out for sure. What I do know is that, over the past hour, this record has transformed a sunny orchard into an eerily gorgeous alien landscape. That in itself is a hell of an accomplishment.