'Insides' begins with a slow swell of strings that's majestic and has a hint of the Gaelic about it. After a mere two and a half minutes, however, 'The Wider Sun' fades out and into the spacious, eerie, crackly intro of 'Vessel,' where a trip-hop beat and growling sub-bass soon take control of the shifting, drifting soundscape.
Hopkins segues each track into the next seamlessly, rendering 'Insides' not a collection of songs, but a magnificently architectured sonic adventure, that slides effortlessly from subtly dark and slightly creepy quiet passages to pulsating percussion-led grooves that are simultaneously danceable and cerebral.
Following the expansive disco of 'Wire,' 'Colour Eye' slows the pace and breaks the millpond smooth surface with a nasty, glitchy, scratchy click and pop percussion that builds to a grating gyrating throb and eventually gives way to the sound of rainfall. This leads into the nine-minute epic 'Light Through the Veins,' which starts off somewhere between Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and ends up, well, more or less in the same place only more ambiently. It's not exactly gripping, but is liable to induce a trance-like state.
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'The Low Places' is similarly soporific and dreamlike, before the gentle tinkle of piano heralds the arrival of 'Small Memory.' Through more drifting soundscapes, the piano motif resurfaces sporadically from hereon in to the end, at which point I feel perfectly relaxed, as though my stresses have evaporated.
A Mike Oldfield for the new millennium? Perhaps... but infinitely cooler, of course.
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