Bomb The Bass - Back To Light

Tim Simenon, former poster boy of the DJ sampling revolution in the 1980s, has reinvented himself under the Bomb The Bass moniker with each successive album. In fact, with 1995’s kaledioscopic Clear, he seemed to be morphing between each song. The thirteen year wait for follow-up Future Chaos brought consistency to Simenon’s palette and was no worse off for it. It’s therefore genuinely disappointing that a mere eighteen months later, Back To Light finds him breaking very little new ground. As the name suggests, it’s an altogether brighter and fresher sound, more an open-air, pre-Balearic rave than the dark, psychotic comedown we might expect. However, Back To Light finds it difficult to break out of the incessant, bubbling synth groove that Simenon nailed on Future Chaos, with consistency becoming formulaic this time around. Given the wildly differing gestation periods he operates in, we can only advise Tim to take his time in future. [Darren Carle]