Member of English trip hop/alternative rock band, Stateless, kidkanevil was originally brought in on sampling, turntable and programming duties. However, with two solo albums already under his belt, the artist evidently feels he has as much to offer separately.

Unfortunately, when I see a 12-track album weighing in at not much more than 35 minutes, experience tells me ideas might be at a premium. As it turns out, my intuitiveness is proved correct, despite Basho Basho starting reasonably well on Latern 1, following a short intro.

The track has shades of Amon Tobin, with boundless, resonating found sounds stepping around spidery plucked strings and lucid percussion.

From here onwards, however, Basho Basho struggles to impress; the use of child vocal samples and edits from the computer game ‘Pacman’ on the J-Pop track Megajoy never rises above gimmick status – and when this method also trickles onto the next track you soon realise that kidkanevil’s sound has limited attributes.

Land of Plenty/Bokusha 2 threatens to add emotional impact, thanks to the use of melancholy piano tones, but again, its vulgar use of movie samples and ill-fitting string sounds turn the track into an unholy mess of disparate ideas. At times kidkanevil even seems bored with his own music, welding nonsensical add-ons to his songs purely for effect.

Basho Basho all but loses the plot from its middle to end, with a series of very short atmospheric tracks that communicate little sentiment, although the closing four tracks offer a little bit more musicality. The Floating World combines a pungent bassline groove with well-programmed percussion but soon vomits on itself; kidkanevil’s repetitive use of vocal samples from movies/TV and suchlike is profoundly irritating, corny and, as always, mostly used to paper over the cracks.

As you can probably guess by now, I wouldn’t recommended this to many, as the few good ideas on show are witlessly crushed by a lack of sophistication, due care and attention.