Beautiful Rewind

After more than a decade of serving up solid Four Tet material for other labels, Kieran Hebden has gone rogue in recent years, using his Text imprint as a platform to press sporadic singles and one-off collaborations with high-profile underground heroes like Thom Yorke and Burial. Last year's Pink dropped many of those 12-inches in one place alongside a few new tracks, but it wasn't a proper "album" in the way Beautiful Rewind aims to be. Produced in relative isolation while Hebden refused press requests and shared the occasional song over Twitter, it ends up nailing Hebden's goal of going back underground while still making his music widely available. There's a reason "Kool FM" references one of London's most beloved pirate stations; Beautiful Rewind hopes to reclaim the mad-for-it spirit that warehouse raves and radio waves ran on before the Man started busting both of 'em. And with highlights as immediate as the fluttering hooks of "Parallel Jalebi," the scrambled rhyme schemes of "Aerial," and the peak-hour pounding of "Buchla," it works.