Lee Jones

Ever since dropping the subtly brilliant 2006 album Songs For the Gentle as My My (with Nicolas Hoppner), Lee Jones has kept busy at the forefront of quality minimal with a steady stream of singles on the Aus label and a few others. Electronic Frank is Jones’s first solo album and, like My My, it’s brimming with the micro-sampled string and piano sections, not to mention snippets of soul vocalists, that give it such an opulent and full sound. The results sound like what you’d expect from Akufen, if he were in the habit of releasing new music these days: intelligent and experimental in a rigorous, studied sense, not so much for clubs but great for anywhere else. Very few of the 14 tracks vary much in terms of tempo and approach, and so the album has a persistent sense of same-ness running throughout but in Jones’s hands, that’s not so much nagging boredom as a pleasantly paced consistency that never gets too hard or too mellow. This allows the listener to hang around long enough to pick up on the subtleties at work in the mix. Jones is a pointillist with his samples and Electronic Frank is detail-driven and warm as a result.