Crooked Ceilings is a double-disc set featuring one disc in the now-familiar
Roots of Orchis style: downtempo beats with subtle sampling and turntablism, married to spacious post-rock instrumental improvisations. The 11 tracks on disc one, most of them in the five-to-seven-minute range, explore an unfortunately limited set of moods and sounds, so that the whole disc at times sounds disturbingly like a single 48-minute piece. The more varied and intriguing second disc consists of
Roots of Orchis remixes by the likes of Atair, Controller 7, and
Black Heart Procession leader Pall Jenkins, whose "Limit the Last" is a tape-splice-and-reverb mutation that's the most bracing thing on either disc. While there's nothing at all wrong with
Crooked Ceilings, and fans of the
Roots of Orchis probably won't be disappointed, there's a distressingly samey quality to
Crooked Ceilings that earlier albums like 2002's far superior
Some Things Plural avoided. ~ Stewart Mason