Yppah - Eighty One

The soundtrack to your life is probably a playlist of songs that have wormed their way into your subconscious through a process involving repetition, zeitgeist, emotional response, repetition, ubiquity and/or repetition. In this light, the output of – much like the name of – Ninja Tune’s Yppah appears to have been reverse engineered. Most notably on his last joyful effort They Know What Ghost Know, Californian Joe Corrales Jr turned out ditties such as 'Bobbie Joe Wilson' that could’ve have been theme tunes for post-Seinfeld sitcoms (thankfully without the slap bass).

Eighty One keeps to the manifesto, delivering the kind of chirpy trills and stirring moments that you would like to be heard in the backdrop should your existence be filmed in front of a braying studio audience. Tied into the April release date maybe, the cover presents a weather front of changeable conditions, the dawn of a new day, warm sunbeams seeping through or rainclouds barging in and dispatching a soaking. The human experience is just as fluid and as a body of work this album instills that sense of irregularity, touching on the stylings of shoegaze and the indulgence of postrock as much as the pointers of electronica.

Intriguingly, it also yields more in the way of human interaction, with the gloopy vocals of Anomie Belle providing us with a spokesperson for the surges of beats and melodies. So while some of this album rattles around like The Go Team (the restless 'Paper Knife') or even unfashionably like Moby (see 'R. Mullen'), there are links to Yppah’s contemporaries, the more underground, the likes of the our own bedroom aural alchemist Hiatus and his musings with singer Shura.

Deeply nostalgic from its opening, childish giggles marking its arrival of 'Blue Schwinn', a song that gorges on The Campfire Headphase-era Boards of Canada, which proves a key influence throughout (particularly 'Film Burn'). The musical equivalent of Hipstamatic’s deliberately sepia-tinged revisionist photographs – the album title even nods to the year of its creator’s birth – Eighty One wallows in a partially imaginary past. It is also a lush, glorious, technicolour, lavishly widescreen soundscape, the sort of soundtrack that you can only hope that your life lives up to.