I finally got to give the new BOC album Campfire Headphase a good listen, thanks to the good graces of a friend of mine. I had heard that the new album was more “guitar-heavy” from online posts, but I wasn’t sure what to expect until I actually heard it. Not to start pointing out comparisons, but the duo seems to have moved in a direction away from the more Coil sounding grooves featured on Geogaddi and more toward more accoustic minded downtempo tracks, somewhat reminiscent of tracks from the last two Massive Attack albums. In fact, every time I hear the track “Dayvan Cowboy,” I expect the voices of Daddy G or Tricky to erupt half way through the track, and tracks like Hey Saturday Sun and Peacock Tail certainly sound as though they could carry the voice of Robert Del Naja in there somewhere.
That is not to say that it doesn’t sound like BOC, which it certainly does, albeit an evolution from earlier work. Less influential are the ’70’s era instructional 8mm films. BOC seem to be borrowing now from a more recent era in their lives, and the memories evoked aren’t quite as poignant and the messages are either less cryptic or buried deeper than in previous albums (have to listen more…); as a total geek, I’m also a little disappointed on the first couple of listens at the lack of math references (ah, what are ya gonna do?). The arrangements are, however, quite catchy and sonically rich, and the album as a whole does not disappoint — definitely worth a place in your permanent music collection.