I was initially planning to begin this review with a tirade about how it's stupid for artists to untitle their albums. After all, what once might have been a bold gesture for an artist to make has quickly generated into yet another trite cliché, along with the self-titled album, for bands to either prove that they're edgy and original, or for dinosaur bands to demonstrate that they're re-inventing themselves. Given that Autechre have been around for years now, I initially took this as a distressing sign that they might have indulged in a bit of re-invention, something that bands rarely come out of better than when they went in. Then, of course, I realised that the album did indeed have a title, and that title was "Untilted", not "Untitled", which more or less made my planned opening diatribe irrelevant.

The fact that this isn't a naff "re-invention" album is a good thing though. Unlike many lesser bands, Autechre probably don't give a toss what the general public thinks about them, and they'll do whatever they like regardless of what's currently on the charts. That was certainly the case with their last album "Draft 7:30", which was absolute chart poison, but only because the band knew what they wanted to do, and did it, without keeping a distracting eye on the opinions of spineless music critics who wanted them to copy their influential "Tri Repetae++" album. They've taken much the same tack with "Untilted", in that although it borrows elements from their commercially successful records, it is still very much its own album.

The album opener, for instance, LCC, starts things off in a very traditionalist way, by Autechre standards. An artillery-like pattern of beats and noise emerges, building and building like a gathering storm, before it's abruptly cut off around the seven-minute mark. Augmatic Disport is another interesting piece, which starts off with a simple repeating melody, which gets more and more fractured as the song progresses, as if its trying to free itself from the rigid, yet brittle frame that the song is put into. It's probably my favourite piece here, sounding like shards of broken glass, as opposed to the smooth polished stones of mainstream electronic music.

Sublimit, the final track here, is where things really go crazy though. Over its fifteen minute runtime, it moves between the processed beats that Autechre have made their own over the years, to some pleasant dub, to avant-garde experimentalism, to a warm drone that closes the song almost perfectly. It's the sort of thing that lesser groups can't put together without things going awry, but it sounds great put together here, because every section of the track would make a great, self-contained piece of music by itself.

Many of the songs here are familiar enough to be listenable, with just enough strange, alien things, such as the sudden cutoff in LCC, and the bizarre hiss in The Trees, thrown into the mixture to grab the attention of the listener. It does get a little bogged down sometimes in a few of the songs, but most of the boring sections are mercifully short. Don't expect to hear this at nightclubs full of girls with too much silicone and too little imagination, but if you like your music with some attitude and style, this is for you.