November: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Romare 'Love Songs: Part Two' (Ninja Tune)

We thought we had Romare’s number. After a bonkers 2012 EP on Black Acre that joined the dots between African sounds, blues and footworking/bass music, Archie Fairhurst settled down into a groove. ‘Projections’, his debut album on Ninja Tune last year, was much smoother: it still dug deep into the past for samples, but evened out the results into a laid-back listening experience which reached a broad audience, suggesting the possibility that he might do very well for himself as a kind of St Germain, or even Moby, of the 2010s. But judging by this album, it seems like Fairhurst hadn’t subdued his experimental urges that much at all, nor his love of a bit of grit in his sound. Even the most obvious tracks here are rougher and tougher: where ‘Projections’ owed a big debt to the smoother side of Moodymann’s productions, both of the four-to-the-foor tracks here, ‘All Night’ and ‘Who Loves You’, are rugged disco cut-ups with a glorious rawness reminiscent of Theo Parrish at his most direct.

It gets weirder elsewhere. Other tracks have a steady kick and soulful samples, but these are made glitchy and trippy in the style of classic Akufen (see ‘Come Close to Me’ and ‘New Love’), or have wonky synth tones that blurt out of the mix (‘Je T’Aime’, ‘L.U.V.’). And the downtempo tunes that surround them also swerve off their expected tracks and into psychedelic and deliciously weird territory. This is precisely the sort of confounding of expectations we love to hear, and bodes well for a long, interesting career.

9/10