Fourteen tracks, seven featured singers, three languages, and somehow the whole album still sounds like it’s checking its watch and rushing. That’s the strange trick of Distance in Static, Bonobo’s eighth and club-vibed album. It’s stacked with talent — Arooj Aftab drifting through “Fire on the Water,” Joy Crookes aching her way across “Always on Your Side,” Ichiko Aoba closing things out like a paper lantern floating downriver on “Equinoctial,” and yet the record rarely commits to a mood long enough to earn it.
Simon Green built this one in pieces — LA, Tokyo, London, a stretch at Neil Young’s ranch — and you can feel the seams. Where is magnum opus, Black Sands felt like a single held breath, a record that trusted silence as much as sound, Distance in Static keeps clearing its throat. “Me and You” and “Uncasually” chase a club pulse that’s fine on its own terms but reads like Bonobo borrowing someone else’s sound, almost a diluted Fred Again… The guzheng textures and the Farsi-language samples on “Shokoufeh” are gorgeous in isolation, genuinely — but they land as ornaments rather than architecture.
The old records — Black Sands, even Migration at its best — had more weight because Green let the low end do the grieving. Now, the bass mostly keeps time.
“Drift” almost gets there, a slow unspooling that recalls “Kong” or “Kiara,” but it fades before it commits to the ache. That’s the album, constantly on the verge of the old majesty, constantly pulling back before it costs him anything.
None of this makes Distance in Static bad. It’s polished, generous, well-travelled, but it’s a record that wants to be a passport more than a wound.
