Top Ten Albums of 2006: #10 - "Hello Everything" by Squarepusher

By my count, this is Tom Jenkinson's tenth album as Squarepusher. When you've gotten that far down the road, what else is there to do but release a greatest hits collection, right? Longtime fans of Squarepusher are wise to his ways however, and probably expected nothing less than a complete departure from What Has Come Before. But if you're Jenkinson though, meeting expectations is simply not part of the game. And so we get Hello Everything, which is neither fish nor fowl...and yet a bit of both.

While every track on Hello Everything is a new composition, listening to the album one gets a sense that we're being given a tour of the widely varied styles that Squarepusher's releases have explored over the years. It's all here: the manic drum'n'bass in "Hello Meow", the droning tension in "Vacuum Garden", the slow layered build in "Rotate Electrolyte", the electro-prog jazz in "Plotinus" and the signature Squarepusher spastic attack of "The Modern Bass Guitar". In a sense we do get a greatest hits, but on Jenkinson's terms not ours.

More than anything else though, Hello Everything has something completely new: warmth. Every track – even the most abstract – is infused with a sense of joy and light (but never "lite"). Squarepusher's been a lot of things over the years, but the last thing anyone expected was out-and-out happy. Perhaps the strangest thing: is seems to suit him well. At no point in the album do I find myself thinking "this doesn't work". In fact, I really like the change of pace.

Ten albums in, and still surprising us. Thanks for that!