home > browse > cd-feature > view article

CD Feature/ Alif Tree: "Clockwork"

  Tobias

Between this latest album and 2006's French Cuisine, DJ Alif Tree has proven he isn't just another unbathed, nostril-mining acid-jazz fixture phoning Ableton-scribbles into a world that doesn't care about the genre; there's a pattern to what he's doing.

"Au Revoir" opens the album in a stream of downtempo, cello-haunted jazz dotted with wiggling-diving-board glitches, this leading into "Way Down South," a ham-handedly obvious nod to Alabama 3's "Woke Up" (the opening theme from Sopranos), up to and including the groggy vocal line. Although everything here is rooted in downtempo, nu-jazz and trip-hop, the odd bedfellow list of vocalists lends a chameleon-like quality to the album, which brings us to the lonesome but unworried "Never Be the Same," sung by a Sting clone recovering from dub love. "Mai" offers barbecue nu-jazz with a nice nick of Zero 7's Sia tabled by Emilie Satt; "Timestretched" ties elevator-music-ready trumpets to an insistent flow of open guitar chords.

As stated, all this is in line with the previous album, a running of the emotional gamut -- an album-album, and thus it's probably more conducive to headphones or mix burns than something you want to have pattering away on the drive to the court date.

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Alif Tree
Homepage: Compost Records