Ambivalence Avenue

While Ambivalence Avenue is an excellent album by any measure, Bibio deserves extra credit for venturing outside of his established comfort zone.

It helps that Wilkinson sings sweetly, too, distancing and layering his vocals for that dewy, lost-in-the-woods effect. [Aug 2009, p.87]

It’d take some mad science to mix all of Bibio’s elements, old and new, into a sound as definitive as the one he established over his first five years as an artist, but Ambivalence Avenue is a great fresh start.

His remarkable Warp debut follows a series of effective "folktronica" albums on the US independent Mush. [Jul 2009, p.117]

For his sense of structure and emotional give and take is acute, so that we move from loud to quiet, from slow to quite fast, from acoustic to electronic, with an ease that makes perfect sense.

Yes, Ambivalence Avenue is an album that defies expectations, and it is also Bibio’s most creative and penetrating release yet.

On this fine album, Wilkinson seems intent on capturing this precious, ambivalent space.

Stephen Wilkinson has taken the field recordings and organic experiments of his previous albums and filtered them through a stylistic prism, resulting in a kaleidoscopic but nearly uniformly accomplished set of songs.

One thing’s for sure, Wilkinson sounds entirely enjoyable on this album. Whether it’s him enjoying himself in crafting this music and/or the fact that Ambivalence Avenue sounds that much more enjoyable than its 2009 predecessor, something’s obviously working.

Bibio's references may already be T-shirts in your bureau, and his dovetailing of crisp guitars, tangling melodies, smart electronic gestures, and resin-hit production values (all evident on the title track) isn't new by any means. But if you can get out from under caring (that is, if you can locate the title lane), you'll feel as liberated as Bibio sounds here — an artist making a mixtape of himself. Folk yes.