As a top-flight music producer, both you stamp your signature sound on to your shoppers’ music otherwise you assist your artist find and enlarge their important self. James Ellis Ford is good on the latter. This decade alone, he has given Kylie Minogue, Gorillaz, Florence + the Machine and Depeche Mode a glow-up, whereas persevering with his collaborations with Arctic Monkeys – Ford has produced most of their albums, together with all-time traditional AM – and, as a drummer, with Alex Turner’s band the Final Shadow Puppets.
Ford began out in psych-tinged indie rockers Simian through the early 00s; when you have been wherever close to a dancefloor in 2006, you’ll keep in mind Justice Vs Simian’s thunderous We Are Your Mates. When Simian break up, James and the band’s synth genius, Jas Shaw, teamed up as digital duo Simian Cellular Disco (SMD). In 2018 the pair had simply completed groundbreaking choral techno album Murmurations when Shaw was identified with AL amyloidosis, a bone marrow dysfunction, and needed to take a step again.
So Ford has made his first solo album, The Hum. Discarding preliminary plans to name in Gorillaz-style favours from pop star buddies, or make a group of temper items, he performs all 18 devices and in addition sings for the primary time. It’s all pleasingly idiosyncratic. There’s candy domesticity on debut single I By no means Wished Something, alongside dirty funk (impressed by his spouse and son’s Palestinian heritage), tranquil tape loops and sylvan folks performed in a radiophonic workshop – every thing coheres one way or the other. Like his earlier productions, there isn’t a sound that dominates, but Ford’s glorious style is plain.
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