You don't have to like jazz fusion to like Squarepusher, but it certainly helps. On Tom Jenkinson's first proper full-length for Warp, his bass-playing background is as important to the proceedings as his trippy drill & bass stylings. It makes for perhaps one of the strongest collections of songs that Tom Jenkinson has ever constructed — a 60-minute romp that includes three eight-plus minute excursions rife with jaw-dropping bass solos, a few interludes that barely rise above sound-design status and a whole bunch of tracks somewhere in between those two poles. ("Coopers World" and "Rustic Raver" are good places to start for those looking for that middle ground. The latter's final two minutes are essentially every single Squarepusher influence poured into one ecstatic rush of a concluding statement.)

Unlike the work that would follow, Hard Normal Daddy holds together perfectly as an album — somehow making a Jaco Pastorius and Richard D. James jam session sound like the most natural thing in the world. James famously penned an essay in the liners to Jenkinson's 1996 Feed Me Weird Things that reads in part: "When my partner Grant Wilson-Clarriarge saw Tom spasmodically twitching in order to play a funky bassline in… read more »