Hybrid – Disappear Here (2010)

SCORE: 9.3

    My friend recently had a dream about me in which I had died. She was hysterical, and waiting for someone to bring help, to bring medicine; no one ever came. In a strange fit of unthinking passion, she kissed me. I woke up.

    It strikes me that sometimes only over-the-top reactions matter. At funerals, cold, calculated responses might be easier for the person giving them, but certainly not for the one receiving them. Instead of turning the other cheek and letting it go, one's real catharsis might be to "break some deserving teeth," to quote the mantra of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's jaded character in Brick. Subtlety can be nonsense, and unlike Hollywood, there isn't enough boldness in music anymore. As aural scientists Hybrid display in their fourth full-length, subtlety is once again the furthest thing from their compositional minds. And what a triumph of expression it is.

    Ever since an absurdly career-defining tour with Moby in 2000 and the endlessly disconsolate and haunted Morning Sci-Fi three years later, Mike Truman and Chris Healings have both been attempting to live up to fresh soundscapes like "Marrakech" and "Finished Symphony." Fortunately, there's never really been anyone doing their style of breakbeat, a kind of mad, breathless Peter Gabriel symphonic lurch to thick 4/4 beats; thus, their niche position of off-accented electronica remained fortified. The castle's impenetrable now: with Disappear Here, Hybrid's made the biggest change in their sound in 14 years with the core addition of vocalist and songwriter Charlotte James. Indeed, the album is so dominated by her pacing prowess that the album could very well have been listed under her name.

    "Empire," the album's opener, is most like their previous work, a long winding track with moments of low cello-and-violin stasis right before another explosion of dancemania. It's the very next track, guested-on by electronica-vocalist superstar Tim Hutton, where it's evident what a long, long weekend at the spa Hybrid's had. One of the most organic and directional beats of Hybrid's career, punctuated by a metallic bassline reminiscent of Faultline or Propellerheads' "Bigger?," gives Hutton the necessary mountaintop he needs to wretch over and over again, "can you hear me now?" As the album continues, "Green Suit Shell" and "Disappear Here" give the album somewhat of an melodic mood swing, full of twinkling, major-key cadences and samples replete with little clicks and whirs panning across the stereo.

    The real standout here is "Formula of Fear," a dense, crushing bullet train with the tagline, "you only hear me when you're miles away." It's felt just that much more powerfully behind the deft orchestration of Andrew Skeet. As the album progresses with wonder after wonder of sounds, it fades away on words: "as numb as I am, it's all in my hands." This is a bold, exploratory 70 minutes of the height of human emotion, all behind the best production Hybrid's ever done. Lyrically lovely, vocally masterful, and electronically sumptuous, shake off your numbness and get this album in your hands; it's the first real polished electronica album of the new decade.

~ Ben Fisher