Compass

2008 is but a distant memory. For those who arrived to the Jamie Lidell soiree that year via Jim, expect to receive a different set of party favors when approaching Compass, the latest effort by the New York-based beat boxing chameleon. Jamie Lidell reorients the prism that illuminated songs like “Another Day” and “Where’d You Go” on his last album. In lieu of the contemporary appropriation of ‘60s sensibilities that dr ew many listeners to Jim, Lidell toils with a more progressive strand of electro-psychedelic soul on his first release of the new decade.

Pitching up on Warp certainly makes people take notice. The electronic label was hardly a bastion of funk and R'n'B, but then Jamie Lidell always had plenty going on to set him apart from the retrogressive soulmen. Yet nothing could stop the sense of general befuddlement that met his arrival. It was splendid moments like 'Multiply' - when the snoopy jam of ‘What’s the Use’ melted into a block-harmonized middle-eight, with added honky ste el drums and all sorts more sparkly adornments - which should have commanded your attention. You couldn’t help but feel, like a half-remembered Lennon anecdote, that there was much more going on in this guy’s head than he could possibly hope to lay out in a studio. What wasn’t accepted was that funk, that sweet, that nasty, that gushy stuff. Because, as well as a songwriting intellect beyond his years, Lidell has a penchant for those melodic erogenous zones - something he has honed further still on Compass.