Pitchfork

All good things come to an end. Even as I flinch writing something so ridden with cliché, its annoyingly enduring truth rips my good intentions to shreds. This is a by-product of clarity, of waking up, and a built-in mantra for growing up, just like you probably heard your mom say when the ice cream melted or you got caught with pot under your bed. It's just a stupid part of life, like all the other clichés, but to see it in action is still traumatic.

I can almost guarantee that Tom Jenkinson is still living to piss off lots of people-- isn't there another tired axiom about a rose by another other name? The thing that gets me about him is that, as a musician, he's obviously got the talent and muse to do pretty much whatever he wants. Witness him playing jazz drums over a stuttered breakbeat, filling in all the open spaces with bass riffs I could swear were piped in from a Brand X album. But at the end of the day, for Squarepusher and every other musical idiot savant, the power of people (and their ears) reigns supreme. When I say all good things come to an end, I'm referring to the notion that we should be impressed by his facility or pissed that he bailed on that U.S. tour.

Ultravisitor is Squarepusher's sixth or seventh album (depending on how you consider Do You Know Squarepusher-- personally, I don't), and succeeds in surprising ways. It's nothing terribly "new," in so far as the basic elements of his palette are concerned. He is still infatuated with atmospheric fusion instrumentals, abstract variations on drum-n-bass and now even more in love with his own live drumming. Yet, he's a good drummer; perhaps a tad faceless in the grand scheme of jazz-funk, but certainly competent, and often genuinely interesting. And if that were Ultravisitor's only highlight, Jenkinson would have fallen on bad times. Luckily, it's not: Practically tattooed across every track is the sense that he's "matured" as both a performer and composer. I know that sounds lame, especially when describing someone with a history of obscenity, irresponsibility and junkie tendencies. I think it's true, though, and far be it from me to knock good music just because I'm tired of the sideshow behind it.

In some ways, Ultravisitor is the only Squarepusher album you need to know about. It contains instances of every idea, texture or beat he's presented until now, and unlike recent releases Do You Know Squarepusher or Go Plastic, little of it sounds stale. In this respect, the record is most similar to Selection Sixteen, though hardly sounding like a collection of leftovers as that album had. In fact, I'd go so far to say he sounds inspired here. More than on any record since Music Is Rotted One Note, Ultravisitor makes the case that not only does nobody else sound like Squarepusher, but that few (if anyone) are capable of even a second-rate impersonation.

This album, however, is too long; there are scattered moments that seem redundant in the face of Jenkinson's own catalog, if not that of new-schoolers like Prefuse 73 or Hrvatski; his improvisations tend to meander, and seem more the work of someone much more in love with himself than his audience. And somehow, none of that diminishes Ultravisitor's accomplishments, chief among them being that it updates the template of the popular virtuoso. This is Squarepusher's "Flight of the Bumblebee".

At almost 80 minutes, Ultravisitor contains too much music to really hold together as a cohesive statement-- if that isn't a seasoned rule of rock, then it certainly applies to Squarepusher. The title track is a deft, yet intensely melodic slice of drum-n-electro-pop, similar in spirit to his lone actual-pop foray "My Red Hot Car", but filtered through a much shorter attention span, even as it's nearly twice as long. The bassline still seems tangentially related to dub and the melody similarly a distant cousin to some Chick Corea line from the early 70s. In the hands of anyone else, or even the same person in other instances, it should add up to a disorganized, wanky mess. To my ears, it sounds like classic instrumental pop. Other tunes, like "Circlewave" and the relatively gentle "Iambic 9 Poetry" (not to be confused with Budakhan Mindphone's "Iambic 5 Poetry"), take this concept and jazz it up or tone it down, respectively. In every case, no matter if Squarepusher programs drum tracks or plays them himself, theme and variation are the keys, again following the frequently beaten path of the virtuoso.

And speaking of classical stuff, how about those guitar and bass solos? Unsurprisingly, the more Jenkinson manages to insert recurring thematic ideas into his cadenzas, the more interesting they are. "I Fulcrum" is an extended bass solo colored in wavering, dissonant feedback, and, like several other songs on the album, it features piped-in crowd noise. It begins as a dark, minor-key figure somewhat reminiscent of Michael Henderson's "Willie Nelson" figure from Miles Davis' Tribute to Jack Johnson, though the deft, harmonized patterns that emerge are purely of Jenkinson's design. The brief guitar piece "Andrei" hardly sounds like it could come from the same person, and in fact would work wonders played at the library as reading music. (And I mean that as a compliment.) Contrarily, "Every Day I Love" just seems aimless and boring. Plus it's called "Every Day I Love".

The best argument for Ultravisitor is not that it's impressive so much as that it's interesting. Like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher exists in a sphere that, for many non-diehard fans, has to put up double the cash to reap the same rewards as it did before folks already knew what to expect. The album isn't a drastic stylistic shift-- though the warped noise-hop of "50 Cycles" suggests Squarepusher might be trying to create a new genre-- but rather, an almost perfectly realized example of how to pull off beat-driven instrumental electronic music without seeming either too abstract, or too hopelessly lost in 1997. I'll leave the light on in the hopes he gets a handle on the guitar solos and the running time next album.