The North Borders

While the fifth studio album from producer Simon Green (a.k.a. Bonobo) continues to soothe the eardrums with his signature style of soulful downbeat, The North Borders is also rife with previously unheard nuances. Over a more studied mix of acoustic and electronic textures, Bonobo mixes in some salient guest vocal parts—with Erykah Badu’s the most alluring. She sounds almost robotic in "Heaven for the Sinner” as her phrasing matches the deliberately stuttered rhythms pulsing over a delicate tangle of horns, harps, strings, and woodwinds. Grey Reverend sets a mellow vibe in the opening “First Fires,” where his smoky inflections recall moments from Terry Callier’s 1972 opus What Color Is Love. Similarly, the creamy inflections of electronica soul singer Szjerdene are a perfect fit the ethereal “Towers,” which nicely balances the rich resonance of wooden percussion with the slow percolation of drum-machine beats and what sounds like vintage analog synth tones. She turns up again in the more spatial “Transits,” which has a dusty-vinyl effect that approximates the warm crackles and pops of playing an old record.