Send "Bibio " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 After switching up his game on the startlingly good Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio became his own tough act to follow. As if lingering in the moment, he now issues The Apple and the Tooth, which collects remixes of his breakthrough album with four new tracks. They lack the immediate impact of Avenue's highs, because they pull back from wrenched beats into the more familiar territories of folk and psychedelia. They're good tracks, they just grow on you more slowly. They'd have been even better if he'd finished them.The title track is killer, although it sounds more Stones Throw than Warp-- bounding flute loops, ratcheting percussion, and whizzing guitars shimmy like a bum wheel. It seems like it's building toward something great, but then just ends after a couple of minutes, mid-development. "Rotten Rudd" does the same thing. At least "Bones & Skulls", sparkling but thick with incense, feels more like a song than a draft. But then on "Steal the Lamp" (lava, one presumes), we're back to the two-minute bailout, after glowing scales traced around pittering drums prime us for a drenching psychedelic anthem. The compelling yet skimpy new material feels mostly like an occasion for the remixes, some of which are actually quite worthwhile. Bibio's own retooling of "Palm of Your Wave" is arguably more essential than his new productions. The vocal is the same, but there's a new guitar part that snakes like ivy. It's meaningfully transformed, yet still angelically songful. The other successful remixes follow suit. Wax Stag smooths out the jumpy "Sugarette" into a dreamy new-wave ballad, its vocal accents cunningly wrought into a dainty music-box lead. Eskmo turns "Dwrcan" into a lurching, primordial thing, amplifying a faint oozy quality already latent in it. And Leatherette puts "Lovers' Carvings" on ice, using pitch-shifted vocal snippets to abstractly sketch its melody....full text |
| Musicouch |
| Having torn up his own rulebook with the release of his fourth long player ‘Ambivalence Avenue’ in June earlier this year, Bibio returns just a matter of months later with a new offering, ‘The Apple and The Tooth’. There was certainly nothing ambivalent about Ambivalence Avenue, with Bibio boldly striding away from the atmospheric folk-pop of his previous releases to create a record that embraces the experimental hip-hop of the likes of J Dilla and Flying Lotus as much as it does Bibio’s traditional ambient folk leanings, while tracks such as ‘Jealous of Roses’ leaves the listener wondering if their music library had shuffled to a George Clinton recording by mistake. Read more in Musicouching « Echos From Macro Grizzly Wolfmother, Cosmic Egg » On The Apple and The Tooth, Bibio shows no sign that this musical innovation was a fluke. Very much a sister record to his June release, it features four new tracks – the title track, ‘Rotten Rudd’, ‘Bones & Skulls’ and ‘Steal The Lamp’ – as well as a collection of remixes of songs off Ambivalence Avenue. Since departing independent imprint Mush Records for the similar, yet substantially more heavyweight, Warp Records after the release of his fairly stale third album ‘Vignetting the Compost’ in February this year (yes, The Apple and The Tooth is Bibio’s third full release of 2009), Bibio has happily adopted much of the Warp dogma. Despite opening like the theme to a 1980s American cop drama, Steal The Lamp progresses in to a psychedelic dreamscape before teasing in a hint of dubstep and giving a firm nod to Warp legends Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, closing the track with scattered acid drum and bass patterns. The Apple and The Tooth and Bones & Skulls carry clear influences from Warp’s American contingent, the abstract instrumental hip-hop beat-makers such as L.A’s Flying Lotus, which are combined with the folk-pop guitar and vocals on which Bibio cut his teeth. Of the four tracks, Rotten Rudd is probably most evocative of the Bibio of old, yet it still injects a kick to the ambient guitar melody, with some pulsating bass making for a wholly more vibrant track than would have been found on earlier albums....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| Bibio follows up his acclaimed Warp debut Ambivalence Avenue with The Apple and the Tooth. Coming just months after his last effort, this album features four new songs, as well as remixes of Ambivalence Avenue tracks by the likes of Clark, Eskmo, and Wax Stag, and a reworking of "Palm of Your Wave" by Bibio himself....full text |
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