on Confidence

Nightmares On Wax returns with new album Shout Out! To Freedom…, a deeply personal project built from life-affirming realizations brought on by a period of profound change in his life. The result is an exploration of musical and personal freedom, and N.O.W's deepest record to date. Shout Out! To Freedom… is a highly collaborative affair which sees Evelyn combine with a variety of artists, including Shabaka Hutchings, Greentea Peng, Haile Supreme, Pip Millett and more.

Four years on from Smoker's Delight and, fortunately, little has changed for George Evelyn's Nightmares on Wax project. While he could've easily been forgiven for following the nu-beat crowd and inserting a few prescient big beats into the blunted trip-hop formula, it's all clear from the opener, "Les Nuits" (a NoW theme of sorts, repeated from Smoker's Delight), that at hand is a return to form, not a turn away from the trip-hop style that took such a beating during the late '90s. The lazy-day soul samples driving tracks like "Morse" and "Finer" are perfect examples that instrumental hip-hop doesn't have to resort to the usual producer's bag of tricks to make for music leagues beyond the average. There's also a focus here lacking from previous material; fewer interludes make for a more concentrated listening experience…

George Evelyn, the Nightmares on Wax producer who provided the template for 2000-2001's downbeat movement almost a decade before it became the bane of mix album fans, returned just in time with another LP of supremely chilled beats. Unfortunately, though, Mind Elevation isn't the unqualified triumph of Carboot Soul or Smoker's Delight, with Evelyn substituting a couple of vocal tracks for the trance-state trip-hop of his previous work. Admittedly, the acid jazz groover "Date with Destiny" and the breezy dub track "70s 80s" prove that Evelyn is surprisingly proficient at crafting a good production for use under a vocal, combining a bare few elements (like the good acid house producer he is) yet weaving them together well…

Thought So… is a bit of a travelogue for Nightmares on Wax, consisting of tracks recorded in locales ranging from Leeds to Ibiza - and definitely many places in between. Utilizing an intriguing studio named Camper Van Somewhere (as in, "Recorded on the…"), George Evelyn and Robin Taylor-Firth keep their productions painfully sparse, par for the course in the NoW catalog. Sometimes they're a little too sparse, specifically the first few tracks, where listeners might get the feeling they're trapped back in 1996 - when a naked breakbeat and an occasional effect or sample were the only things necessary for an innovative production…