Review of 'Inferno' by Boards of Canada

The Scottish electronic duo deliver the perfect Doomsday soundtrack on their first album in 13 years.

Although BoC are sometimes labelled IDM (intelligent dance music), you’ll have a hard time dancing to any of their records. They instead excel at creating atmospheric electronic soundscapes for lying back with headphones on or occupying a long lonely night drive (although I’ve noticed much of the detail can be lost while listening to this album in the car).

The duo always aim for an unsettling atmosphere, but it’s a different type of unsettling on each LP. Music Has A Right To Children had a sense of uncanny nostalgia to it that felt like returning to a childhood home as an adult, whereas Geogaddi adopted an occult eeriness that felt like playing with a Ouija board. Their last album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, meanwhile had a bleak post-apocalyptic theme to it. According to fan theories, this new album Inferno is a prequel to Tomorrow’s Harvest – music to accompany the apocalypse itself. The track titles reflect this with ‘Somewhere Right Now In The Future’ suggesting that this apocalypse is happening right now, while ‘All Reason Departs’ suggests a sense of despair as it unfolds.

There’s a notable lack of melodies on this album – nothing you can attempt to hum. Instead, each track revolves around haunting uneasy chord progressions. These chords are produced using soft synths and mixed low in order to sound dreamy and distant, while the percussion is crisp and upfront. The choice of samples throughout is meanwhile typically strange, giving each track a more surreal vibe and sometimes hinting at a narrative. A religious theme seems to link many of them -  ‘…Father And Son’ uses an excerpt from a BBC documentary called Man Alive in which a father tries to reason with his son to leave the Children of God cult, while ‘Naraka’ weaves in uplifting Hare Krishna chants. The first ties in with the sense of despair, while the second could be viewed as a glimmer of hope.

All of this makes Inferno very engaging, even if there aren’t many individual tunes to hook you. Part of me wishes there were a few other tracks like ‘Prophecy At 1420 MHz’ and ‘Naraka’ that were propelled along by a distinct beat  - I would have expected an apocalypse soundtrack to be a bit more explosive. But maybe the world was never going to end with a bang. Maybe it was always going to burn away slowly, in which case Inferno’s serving of gloomy slow burners is very apt. 

★★★★☆

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