There is no reason I should like this album. None. It has the same dead on loop-heavy repetition that scuppered Daft Punk’s latest release. The album title is supposed to be a reference to the date of each song’s samples, but these notations do little to offer any temporal link to them. What’s worst is that the DJs behind ’64 – 95’ had previously crafted perfect downtempo with ‘Lost Horizons’ and ‘Lemonjelly.ky;’ I mean, “The Staunton Lick” is still just an amazingly suave tune.

Yet I still like this album … a lot. I like it because it doesn’t aim for any great or dynamic flows or any songs filled with interwoven complexity. The focus is on the easy acceptance of a fundamentally appeasing beat combined with some marginal changes at sundry increments to keep it all from devolving to electro-wank. In essence, this is the same perfect downtempo music they’ve been making for a while now, except that the lingering, reverb-laden beats are replaced by thumping kick drum anthems and accelerated tempos; the pianos and acoustic guitars traded in for extended guitar riffs. In short, this is a downtempo album under the guise of Big Beat.

It could have been different, of course. ’64 – ’95 could have been like Overseer’s ‘Wreckage’—just a long series of myopic “Rockerfeller Skank” rips that sought to be featured in as many car commercials as possible—but whereas Overseer relished the unmasked (and quickly aging), feral nature of Big Beat, Lemon Jelly instead present the genre with calm and collection. The rush of “’88 aka Come Down On Me” after the Intro ends is a little shocking, the guitar shooting forwards and echoing as the beat is set up. But that beat drives the song slowly and steadily and the guitars really only rear their heads again with the same ferocity near the song’s end.

And boy, when these guys get a good groove going, they know how to keep it. “’93 aka Don’t Stop Now” is bona fide smooth, equipped with a slowly rolling electronic piano loop, leading into xylophone loops, and all of it combining with a whispered and reverbed vocal performance repeating the chorus. “’75 aka Stay With You” owes its success to a stronger bass melody than the rest, bending guitar notes, and a soulful choral refrain. “’90 aka Man Like Me” is perhaps the most successful, the bass progression each time marking a drop in the song’s overall structure and deferring its melody to the back of dual vocalists, one repeating the song’s title and the other, a child, replacing ‘Man’ with ‘Fan.’

Lemon Jelly’s basic system does backfire slightly at certain points, however. “’68 aka Only Time” remains mostly stagnant, the acoustic loop doing little to accentuate the bridges and a vocal sample lowered a couple octaves gives the song a very plastic, blunt sheen, while “’95 aka Make Things Right” has a vocal melody that sounds surprisingly hackneyed. But these are both natural upshots of utilizing a simple and singular formula for an entire album; it surprises me that any of these songs have worked at all, much less how successfully so.

They do very little in each song, but the little they do is just, uhh, really well done. A couple of shifts in rhythm and structure here and there combined with an underlying solid beat does wonders for the album, offering a feeling of control and coordination to the entire piece. Those who dislike this album, those who cannot find a single agreeable track, are simply missing an essential groove in their very bones.