Black Sands

The fourth full studio album from UK producer/songwriter/musician Simon Green is a lush collision of live jazz/soul/folk instrumentation and electronic beatology. Tracks like Kong are ‘classic’ Dial M-period Bonobo: a mod-ish instrumental with an MPC drum-break that slaps, while Animals develops this aesthetic further, recreating that earlier, sample-heavy Bonobo sound but then taking a wonderful turn halfway through into a devotional jazz workout. Elsewhere there’s rich, cinematic, orchestrated, thematic electro-sample-soul and jazz-step, happily mashing up melancholy brass, woodwind and acoustic guitar arpeggios with firey, clattering snare patterns and occasional synths and FX. 

Black Sands is an intricate, sweeping and sultry album, a further distillation of the jazz/folk/live elements of Bonobo’s sound, which although still engaging with club culture is also a further retreat from hip hop elements too, into a more expansive musical place.