A Guy Called Gerald

As an introduction to the work of A Guy Called Gerald, the monster name in electronic music, this album is a disappointment. Opening with a short ambient intro and ending with a slow-building nearly nu-jazz-lite house tune, this album is astonishingly dull. Throughout he maintains a calm presence via sustained synths, which float around tightly structured beats, but it lacks the sincerity to draw listeners into the spiritual mind set it tries to project. The Ursula Rucker cut "Millennium Sanhedrin” features Rucker’s oddly uninspired beat poetry over the echo of a jazz beat so filtered it’s lost its soul. "Tanjeen” and "Strangest Changes” are more upbeat, but maintain that unsatisfying atmospheric sheen. It listens like an album released five years after its time.