The Music Scene

In The Music Scene, Blockhead has made both pretty melancholic tracks and straight-up thump-the-desk bangers bedfellows, and for that the new decade should be eternally thankful.

Eclectic, calming and yet strangely energetic, his music is well worth getting acquainted with.

While DJ Shadow keeps us hanging for a return to form, Blockhead picks up the slack with a fantastic disc that's solid throughout. [Mar 2010, p.90]

Parts of The Music Scene flirt with and even achieve greatness, standing tall as instrumentals any music fan would be advised to hear. Regrettably, the tracks in the box labeled “same old Blockhead” stick out amongst such greatness, keeping the album from achieving same.

The Music Scene is a good album, but one that is hard to get excited about.

He’s good at what he does, and, to boot, he continues to release consistently enjoyable music, perhaps single-handedly keeping the obsolescing trip-hop out of the next decade’s dentist office.

The Music Scene adds new knots to Blockhead's sly, ironic take on boom-bap, incorporating shifting structures that spiral into changing tempos, half-remembered snippets of soul horns and gnarly old guitars, and occasional drifts into hazy, shimmering psychedelia. Sadly, this fog thickly enshrouds the back half of the disc as the tempos stagnate, rendering it inert and crying out for a shot of adrenaline.