In August, Fred Gibson became the first dance artist to headline the Reading and Leeds festivals. Early on, he addressed the crowd, talking about how nervous he was. It’s the kind of thing festival headliners are wont to say, flattering the magnitude of the event, but in Gibson’s case, it didn’t seem pat: he looked genuinely, frantically uneasy. It’s only been three years since he released his debut solo album, pivoting from what looked like being a lucrative gig behind the scenes as a pop songwriter and producer for BTS, Clean Bandit, Stormzy and George Ezra. His breakthrough single Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing) was a reflection on the privations of the Covid era, released just as lockdown ended. Now, here he is, a bigger festival draw, if the Reading/Leeds bill is to believed, than Lana Del Rey.
In the interim, he’s enjoyed a kind of portmanteau career: big pop-dance hits alongside collaborations with underground figures such as Four Tet; the occasional high-profile production gig for Ed Sheeran next to collaborative ambient albums with Brian Eno. His success has been popular rather than critical, attended by a degree of carping about his well-to-do and well-connected background (he is descended from Huntingdonshire gentry, Eno was his parents’ neighbour) and the alleged unoriginality of his musical approach.
His fourth album underlines said approach’s pros and cons. It highlights that Gibson is an authentically great pop-house producer. As you might expect from someone initially better known as a songwriter than an artist, he’s handy with a nagging hook. His sound is more subtle and nuanced than some of his neon-hued peers, but still capable of springing surprises: former single Ten suddenly jolts from Jim Legxacy providing a Drake-ish melody over a four-to-the-floor pulse into an interlude inspired by chopped-and-screwed hip-hop and back again.
And his magpie borrowings suggest a scholarly approach to dance music history: the late San Francisco house producer Scott Hardkiss crops up in sampled form on closer Backseat, while one of the album’s touchstones is clearly Orbital’s 1991 techno classic Belfast, the influence of which hangs over both Adore U and Glow, the latter an instrumental collaboration with Skrillex, Four Tet and London producer Duskus that might well be the album’s highlight. He corrals an impressively eclectic choice of guest vocalists, albeit all stuck through Auto-Tune. Its use feels creative on Adore U, where Nigerian singer Obongjayar’s voice is so laden with the effect that it seems to be quivering or shimmering; it’s hard to see what’s gained by giving Sampha or indeed Emmylou Harris a robotic sheen, although the melodies they are singing are strong enough to withstand it.
Ten Days comes liberally dressed with voices speaking, rather than singing – voice notes, off-mic recordings from the studio, phone messages, Derry singer-songwriter Soak describing the feeling of falling in love, an experience they compare not merely to “all four seasons happening in one day”, but, winningly, “the first crunch of cheese and onion crisps”. As on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the album opens with a montage of these voices over atmospheric ambience, one big difference being that the voices on Dark Side of the Moon were answering existential questions, and the voices here feel weirdly inconsequential: Soak aside, they’re doing things such as wishing Gibson a happy birthday or declaring something “the nuts”. Without wishing to put too much weight on a 30-second ambient intro, there’s a sense that this keys into Ten Days’ big flaw.
With its succession of brief instrumental interludes and tracks segueing into each other in a way that precludes cherrypicking for playlists, you rather get the feeling Gibson views Ten Days as a grand statement that looks beyond the dancefloor and deals with matters rather deeper than simply rousing the teenagers at Reading into a state of post-GCSE jubilation. Fair enough, but it isn’t really clear what it is making a grand statement about. Instead, a kind of vague all-purpose wistfulness – a signifier of depth, rather than the definite article – hangs over virtually everything here. Only the gospel-ish Peace U Need and the drum’n’bass-inspired Places to Be offer untrammelled euphoria, and it comes as something of a relief when they do. Sometimes the cocktail of four-to-the-floor propulsion and melancholy has an emotional effect, as on Ten or Fear Less, but more often it feels a bit empty and grafted on: music that’s reaching for something unnecessarily and not quite getting there.
Still, there’s nothing about Ten Days that suggests it’s likely to derail Fred Again’s progress; it’s hard to imagine he’s seen his last festival headlining slot. Doubtless its flaws will be less obvious if you’re in the middle of a vast crowd who want to party. Perhaps they’ll even act in its favour commercially – after all, few things inspire TikTokers to soundtrack their videos quite like a bit of vague, all-purpose melancholy. Crisply produced and big on strong melodies, it’s an album that does its job, even if it doesn’t quite do the job you suspect its author wants it to.
