Lance Grabmiller

This album starts off brilliantly and highly engaging but somewhere along the way the rudder and sails of this musical vessel brake, sending the remainder of the CD drifting aimlessly. For the first five tracks, Anthropologist starts off as a trip-hop album, which is difficult to get into on account of the fact that the genre is so saturated that it appears worn out. Yet Grabmiller keeps his music fresh and on point for the first five cuts, infusing them with clips of noise and jazzy instrumental fragments so that his music is seductively detailed. His breaks are as good as anything DJ Cam ever came with, but with his own distinct style. After track five the music on this album goes abstract, which is not a bad thing at first. There are interesting textures and disembodied beat fragments Grabmiller works with in the latter half, but overall the effect is like building a musical house of cards that keeps collapsing before anything definite is made. Compared to the ingenious trip-hop material, the latter half is a let down.