Chicane – The Place You Can't , The Place You Can't Forget

The damp, misty looking cover that graces Chicane's seventh album is somewhat at odds with the artist's usual image of summers in Ibiza. Has the music changed with the imagery?

Not particularly. Nick Bracegirdle has largely been peppering typical Chicane sounds with the latest production techniques in autopilot mode for many years now, and The Place You Can't , the Place You Can't Forget continues in that vein. 'A Love That's Hard to Find' features autotuned vocals, as a nod to popular sounds of the moment. Thankfully, Bracegirdle has ed how to programme more than one drum rhythm, with the fashionably '90s house tinged beats here having a touch of syncopation that's truly refreshing after the horribly rigid loop used throughout his previous few albums.

Generally, though, the Chicane trademarks are there: the same synth pads as ever are present on every track, the usual wistful melodies that blend euphoria with a touch of melancholia. After some utterly disastrous experiments on the last two albums, things here have reverted pretty much to the pop song formula of 2007's Somersault. Only two tracks here run longer than five minutes, and only three are instrumental. The only notable guest vocalist is Tracy Ackerman, known to Chicane fans as the vocalist on 2000's No Ordinary Morning, although she turns in a less remarkable song here on 'Serendipity'; the remaining singers are largely anonymous, although Rosalee O'Connel's Irish accent adds some variety. 'Judder' is the long-overdue Chicane dubstep track, and somehow even worse than that sounds. 'I Came Here for You', on the other hand, with its indistinct vocals and tinny drums, sounds like a demo that somehow found its way onto the album by accident. Closer 'Fear I Must First Let You Go' blends classic Chicane ambience with Bon Iver-esque ethereal vocals, and winds up one of his better recent tracks.

For all the flaws here - and there are many, resulting in what is, frankly, a generic dance-pop album - it's also Bracegirdle's prettiest set of songs in many years. There's no ambient here, and no gorgeous downtempo tracks that made the first two Chicane albums classics that still have appeal beyond the trance scene, but there are also none of the Sigur Rós-aping embarrassments or awful stadium EDM synth stabs that dragged his previous two albums down to near-unlistenability. Really, this is as good as a Chicane pop album could be at this point, which is both the album's strength and weakness. In the end, it's one of the most listenable things he's done since Behind the Sun, and the most forgettable.