High Life

The six-track album (seven if you buy the digital, eight if you pony up for the vinyl edition coming out in August) has the internal warmth and jubilant spirit that its predecessor was lacking, with the music appearing to blossom before you rather than clacking by like a train.

By dispensing with typical pop structure in favour of improvisation and repetition, the pair achieve and maintain an openness and momentum that Someday World lacked. It feels alive.

The team weaves electronic tones, human voice and hypnotic rhythms to create a beefy work designed for maximum volume.

This alien brand of funk is far more open-ended and abstract than the first album, and better for it.

Since it's art, the more you listen, the more you'll find here. [No. 112, p.55]

While not entirely successful, this set’s spontaneity is its greatest strength.

High Life has none of its predecessor's busy, over-caffeinated temperament. [Aug 2014, p.73]

Unlike Someday World, the far thornier High Life doesn’t improve much with repeated plays: These are egghead jams whose esoteric textures bewitch more than their relatively static frameworks.

The constant repetition with more or less subtle shades of developing dynamic and texture in all but the last of these tracks creates a nearly endless groove. And perhaps that's the album's point, creating an album of dance music that's fun to listen to; a mirror image of Someday World's more carefully structured avant pop.

Uniquely imaginative, the duo's efforts will seduce like-minded forward-thinkers, but High Life will be too ostensibly weird to be widely digested.

High Life doesn’t suffer from any real clunkers and is more consistently sonically rewarding, so that makes it the ‘better’ album. And that’s what ultimately makes it the more frustrating of the two; even the more successful collection put together by Eno and Hyde is mostly just further proof that they haven’t yet made the album together that they’re clearly capable of.

The duo's experience and aplomb win out. [Sep 2014, p.108]

It's a more than worthy companion piece, with an unfinished, scrapbook feel that's far from unbecoming. [Sep 2014, p.94]

It does occasionally miss the mark, but that there are any hits to speak of at all shows that Eno and Hyde have a good deal more to offer than the uninspiring gruel of their debut.

It’s not quite as appealing generally speaking, but does feature music for those moments when a soundtrack to a subtle atmosphere is needed-- whether on screen or in imaginations--with hints of more life slipping in between.

You'd rather hope their systems/world music jams might be more wiggy than they are. Still, this second helping is a match for its predecessor.

As is stands, High Life has the sound of a half-finished addendum to a half-finished idea.

There are things going on here that will, in all likelihood, percolate through to stadium pop in due course but Hyde lacks the vocal presence or structural songcraft to shape the material into something greater than its parts.