Pitchfork

Fire Escape is technically a Sunburned Hand of the Man album featuring Kieran Hebden-- aka Four Tet-- as group member, mixer, and producer. But that's an oversimplification: Hebden served as a curator and facilitator, inviting his former tourmates to record for four hours in London's Exchange room. In the studio, he directed, suggesting configurations, themes, and moods and letting Sunburned (eight strong, with two Vibracathedral Orchestra members and Hush Arbors' Keith Wood) route his requests through its haze-and-clamor sensibility. Hebden took the sessions, chopped them into bits, and made "his vision of a Sunburned record." John Moloney, Sunburned cofounder and drummer, has called Hebden "the biggest music fan I've ever met." And, ultimately, Hebden's enthusiasm for sound and shape turns the risky Fire Escape-- essentially, an attempt to add definition to a band whose sound is all about avoiding it-- into one of the more evocative albums in either artist's canon.

If any quality defines every Hebden album-- from his high school band Fridge and the most billowing Four Tet to his questionable collaborations with jazz drummer Steve Reid-- it's utter zeal for sound and its shapes. If that seems intentionally ambiguous, it is: Hebden is as vested in accepted genres and forms as he is in the aleatoric moments (mistakes to some) that he can throw at them. Remember that Hebden put soul hooks over mosquito samples as Four Tet and electro-shocked big, swinging grooves on Steve Reid's Spirit Walk. Here, he's working with a band that's seldom been concerned with "correct" theory for its improvisations. He mixes the band's best moments, then, with its conspicuous imperfections. Shocks of sound from pedals with errantly turned knobs or shorting cords serrate the playful rhythm of "Triple, Double, Everything", and sheets of guitar squall smother an Afrobeat thrum during "Nice Butterfly Mask". "Captain Knowhere" pins bursts of laughter beneath a growling drone.

Fire Escape, though, is not about delineating the mistakes Sunburned makes. Rather, it's about Hebden twisting those aberrations into unexpected textures, something Sunburned's done for most of their career with drums made of junk and guitars acting like tie-dye. But, relative to the bulk of the band's catalogue, Fire Escape is sturdily built and thoroughly composed. Most of its tracks are hitched to definite grooves and/or melodies. Even 15-minute sprawl "The Wind Has Ears" climbs with purpose, Hebden easing colors-- rattling percussion, ramshackle piano, muffled yowls, and sporadic electronics-- into a steadily widening smear. Indeed, Hebden builds from Sunburned's raw sound in a way that suggests he's less interested in the band's open-ended catharsis than he is the variable streams that shape it.

Fire Escape never seems limited in the shapes it can take, and that was always the promise of a collaboration between these bands. The title track hustles with Neu! systematics, mechanical rhythms darting over and under washes of feedback and distortion, while "What Color Is the Sky in the World You Live In?" sounds like a collaboration between Ash Ra Tempel, Charlemagne Palestine, and Sir Richard Bishop. Irresolute piano and indeterminate percussion wend through a bobbing, psychotropic bassline. Over 49 minutes, dub, dance, noise, post-rock, and even house rhythms make cameos, spun into a sprawling web with the élan of a DJ commanding a band capable of making anything it can imagine. In short, Sunburned Hand of the Man-- mixed by Kieran Hebden, a guy in his late 20s still high on what Leonard Bernstein calls "the joy of music"-- sounds exactly like you hoped it would: eclectic, interesting, and unapologetic.