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Albumrecensie

Compost has been guilty for releasing an unhealthy amount of over-refined dance music with super-polite jazz/jazz-funk references the past several years, so it's distressing to see the label's logo pop up on this full-length from Alex Attias' Mustang alias. The "Transitions"/"Twilight" single, released on Attias' Visions label in 1999, remains one of the most adventurous slabs of vinyl associated with broken beat, so any sign that Attias might be setting his sights on well-meaning Afro-Brazilian fusioneering and Roy Ayers tributes stripped of creativity — with track titles like "Samba Sunshine" or "Musica Fantastica" — is a bad one. Thankfully, Back Home rarely gets sucked in by Compostitis. It's most thrilling when it approaches the menace of earlier Mustang tracks; "10,000 Leagues Deeper" and "Darker Side of Light," served back-to-back (featuring expectedly wonderful and otherworldly vocal turns from Bémbé Ségué and Vanessa Freeman), whip up frantic storms of percussion filled with bracing unease. The scope here is similar to that of As One's Out of the Darkness, released just a couple months earlier. In fact, the two albums go hand-in-hand.