Having locked down his
Audiomontage nom de plume to more studio-oriented disco-tinged deep house and established himself as a keyboard supremo within the much talked about and hitherto unrecorded improvisational clique the Bays, Jamie Odell checked into Kudos to turn out a second album under his
Jimpster moniker. As musically elusive as the Freerange label he co-manages with Tom Roberts, Odell deftly avoids any application of convenient pigeonholing in favor of an all-encompassing genre tag that switches from the breakbeat rattlers favored within his Messages From the Hub debut to a more expansive take on funk fusion. While "Deep Down" plumbs the outer reaches of house and the beautiful vocals of Simon Jinadu in "State of Mind" conjure the symphonic synth spirits of
the Alan Parsons Project, so "Fish Island" turns to the fluttering funk feel of his earlier work. Throw in some broken beats, the big bassline "Knuckle Shuffle," and the glacial "B Mine," and this is Odell's best album to date. Get domesticated. ~ Kingsley Marshall