Jacob 2-2

Referencing Mordecai Richler's famed series of youth novels, while adorning his cover art with a picture of a child playing with toys, Jacob 2-2 strives to exude the same nostalgic, vintage emotion fellow electronic artists Boards of Canada used to define their early years. It's certainly not just the imagery that draws a thematic connection to the Scottish brothers, as the debut from Jacob 2-2 musically pulls from Boards of Canada's 1998 masterpiece, Music Has the Right to Children. Piecing together 17 relatively epigrammatic tracks, Herbivore is an album brimming with glowingly warm keyboard hums and cracked beats that march along at a wind-up toy's pace. Although songs like the warped, rhythmic "Platforms" and the joyfully fluffy/claustrophobic "So Long, Solaris" are brimming with kinetic personality, the vinyl crackles on "Milo de Venus" and elfin vocal samples of "Red Heather, Yellow Heather" are lifted virtually wholesale from BoC, making Herbivore a sometimes engrossing, but most of the time distractingly difficult listen.