Fearsome Jewel

And the award for Surrogate Dettinger Album of 2003 goes to: Andrew Thomas, for Fearsome Jewel. The New Zealand producer's first album for Kompakt is quite different from the limited-edition So You Want to Be a (Death) Star, issued three years prior on Involve. Here, Thomas does away with that disc's proclivities for noise damage and sunken, scrambled-up beats. Though still operating within the framework of short track lengths (ten tracks clock in at 35 minutes), it's apparent that he spent at least part of the gap in his release schedule absorbing his new label/home's pop-ambient division — made up by the likes of Dettinger, Wolfgang Voigt, Ulf Lohmann, Klimek, and Markus Guentner. Gentle thrusts of synthetic strings and heavily treated pianos act as soft-focus melodic devices, with minor crackles and submerged beats carrying the skewed yet graceful rhythmic sense. Variations on the same motifs form the basis of the album; while the tracks don't form a suite, the shared components, along with the blurry production sense, make them seem like part of one daydream-like whole. (In other words, good luck singling out and/or recalling a specific track.) This is pop-ambient at its delicate, sweet, romantic best.