Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest (Album)

“Tomorrow’s Harvest”, Boards of Canada’s first album in eight years, sounds like the soundtrack for an oncoming apocalypse. The song titles wreak desolation in themselves, “Cold Earth”, “Sick Times”, “Reach for the Dead”. The album opens with a familiar sound and as the intro dwells upon you, you can visualize a blue geometric pattern, perhaps a square, filling the screen. Then, the music quickly becomes ominous, unsettling and along looms a dark mood that continues for the rest of the album, as the music slowly starts growing upon you.

When the album started streaming on the Web, some wondered if Boards of Canada had lost their knack of making splendid evolving music, whether the band that had generally managed to play with the past in unforgettable ways was finally beginning to sound repetitive.

Boards of Canada consisting of brothers Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison have been around for nearly 20 years and are unquestionably one of the acts who sowed the seeds of today’s rapidly changing electronic music.

Definitely “Tomorrow’s Harvest” is a grand piece of art and Boards of Canada have shown that they’re still very much a part of the present day musical landscape. Played as a whole, the album is unforgettable. The heavy drones and hard arpeggiated patterns connect with subtle, yet stupendous melodies and refined textures.

The extraordinary attention to how the sounds themselves are crafted, the flow of each track to the next and the analogs that make you feel as though your stuck in time; add a marvellous colour to the album.

True to its class, the gloomy closing track on “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, “Semena Mertvykh” (in Russian, the title apparently translates to “seeds of the dead”), was “performed into a dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts in the tape,” according to a recent New York Times interview. (Eoin also noted with pride that the track was recorded in mono.)

Everything about the band including their self induced secrecy (the duo lives in rural Scotland and generally avoids playing live) forms a part and parcel of the  that the experience the group has come to be known for.

The album is just as unrelentingly dark as most of their prior works. As always, Boards of Canada are marvellous and extremely unique as they bestow upon us another magnificent offering!