Pitch Black: Ape To Angel

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating * * * )

The duo of Paddy Free and Michael Hodgson have taken their own good time in delivering a follow-up to 2000's Electronomicon album. It seems knowing your way around so much machinery makes you in-demand in other areas and maybe Pitch Black has become more of a sideline for the pair.

Still, their third offering doesn't seem to suffer from a lack of commitment. Its hour-plus eight tracks offers an electro-dub set that is variously contemplative, moody, aerobic or evocative of extended nocturnal excursions somewhere mysterious.

Some, like Freefall do seem to pass without incident, even with its repeated vocal motif. Still, it manages some elegant ambient pieces, possibly best on the shimmering closer Empty Spaces Missing Units - think R2D2 crooning his little tin heart out in front of a robo-choir.

But where Ape to Angel still earns its wings somewhere between the Russian public service announcement which gives the drum'n'bass-grooved Lost in Translation its exotic edge and Big Trouble Upstairs, which starts off as a synth-squelchfest but finds higher and higher gears throughout its near-eight minute expanse.

Label: Kog