It Should Be Us appeared in 2019 as a kind of stopgap, presented as a quickly made double EP, with the true follow-up to the 2016 LP
Too Many Voices lined up for 2020.
Andy Stott was well on the way to following through until a serious life disruption rendered his promised fifth album unfinished. Months later, a recharged
Stott completed a full-length markedly dissimilar to the partial version. That
Never the Right Time sounds just like an
Andy Stott album, and is separate from what preceded it, offers further proof that the producer's body of work -- like that of fellow hardcore-continuum accelerator
Burial -- is in a realm of its own, albeit one with an atmosphere affected by ever-shifting inspirations. Where It Should Be Us stimulated vigorous movement with juddering house and scrambled juke tracks,
Never the Right Time is much lighter in touch, if heavier in emotions that seem unresolved. Nothing exemplifies this as much as what's at the center, a solo piano piece ready to unfurl into a colossal torch song, only to dissipate within 90 seconds. Before and after that are some of
Stott's most transfixing collaborations with Alison Skidmore. While Skidmore's voice is tender as ever and still phantasmal, cloaked in reverb, her unease shoots through the trembling basslines, tumbling drums, and metallic synthesizers. Some tracks do bring the pain in the rhythmic sense. Layers of percussion in "Never the Right Time" wrench and stammer. Overdriven drums rain down in "Answers." The dizzying "Repetitive Strain," one of
Stott's most peculiar tracks, is something like calliope bashment. No matter the artistic sure-footedness, an air of inner uncertainty is constant. It's also in the emotionally bruised sampled voices and the odd keyboard melodies, and throughout the
Ambient 4: On Land-like looming threat of "Dove Stone." More subtly, it's in a few track titles that read like terse texts of faint reassurance and vexation. What might look and sound like merely another
Stott album has the deepest well of emotion. ~ Andy Kellman