Tom Middleton - Lifetracks

Label: The Big Chill Recordings
Catologue Number: FACTOR19
Format: CD
Date: 2007
Style: Ambient / Chillout
Rating: 6/10
Reviewer: Sidney James


The last time I heard anything by Tom Middleton it was a song named Take Me with you released under the Cosmos name and is was a dreary piece of light muso-prog-soul-dance. It wasn’t helped by the vocal presence of Roachford whose turgid vocals just added the filling to the shit sandwich. So you may ask why I bought it in the first place and why I’m reviewing Middleton’s latest album. Well that’s because it the early 1990’s as part of Reload and Global Communication alongside Mark Pritchard, he released two startling albums in the form of A Collection of short Stories and 76:14.

The news that Middleton had released a new album which wasn’t a mix CD and was supposedly was a return to his ambient works of the early 1990’s therefore had me interested and apprehensive at the same time. Would it equal the high standards of his early work or would it be more of the turd bagel that had been the Cosmos single. Well I can happily say that I won’t be choking on second hand sweet corn tonight but also I’m not going to be praising Middleton in a late night gathering at a stone circle.

Lifetracks lies somewhere between these two extremes. It starts and ends incredibly well with Praha and Enchanting which recall the glory of Global Communications. Praha features lushly chilled electronics propelled forward by a swinging beat and comes across like a sister track to Maiden Voyage. However as the album progresses we get more of the muso Middleton arising. Shinkansen and Yearning feature cod funk basslines that sound like they have been stolen from Mick Karn, while Serpendity breaks in the sounds of Rhodes and light string sweeps. Ending up just sounding a bit too coffee table and nice and inoffensive.

The tables then turn again with Sea of Glass which has some real pathos in its piano and nagging oboe lines. The song is cinematic in its styling and manages to avoid the cheese that Middleton hits on other parts of the album. It’s when Middleton keeps it simple that the music really works as on tracks like Optimystic, the more layers of sounds he uses the more the clawing feeling of chill-out albums with pictures of water splashes or some retro furnished living room fills my mind.

If Middleton had pushed the music into a bit more of a darker direction then Lifetracks would have been a better album as about half of the time its too polite and comes across as aural wallpaper for nice people who live in nice new houses with nice neighbours and frankly boring and mundane lives.