"Go where new experiences await you" is the instruction on the cover of REPO, Black Dice's fifth album since their DFA-backed Beaches & Canyons thrust them into the limelight.  Back then, it did seem like a new experience, a band who had started off playing hardcore producing lengthy krautrock-inspired works, utilising sound collages and pretty much any effect they could lay their hands on, which were helpfully listed in the credits of B&C.  Sounds would squiggle across the spectrum as Hisham Bharoocha drove the motorik beat from behind his kit and one couldn't deny the power of the music or the adventurous nature of the group. 

Since their debut, the experience of each successive Black Dice album has seemed less "new." The departure of the drummer and their close association with Animal Collective (as touring partners, label bosses and - with Terrestrial Tones - bandmates) has influenced their sound, but aside from the occasional foray into African-inspired guitar patterns the basic pattern has been the same: lengthy workouts of sound and sample manipulation over pulsing beats.  If Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton had grown up in New York, he might have made albums that presaged Black Dice by a decade - experimental music that you can dance to, where disco meets Dada.

But whilst Stapleton has refused to sit still for too long, throwing a bewildering array of influences into his work (from the music of Perez Prado through living on a Norwegian island and listening solely to female rappers), Black Dice on REPO are starting to sound tired, as if they are scratching around for fresh ideas but coming up wanting.  There's more perspiration than inspiration here and little revelation, with earlier albums being strip-mined for the sake of the new work rather than casting around outside their insular world.  In the hands of some bands together over a decade, producing an album by drawing on points of your output may result in a career peak, a summation of your essence as creative artists.  But unfortunately, it doesn't happen here.

It is probably because Black Dice were such a breath of fresh air at their arrival and subsequently showed a willingness to progress that their lack of momentum recently is more noticeable.  I put the album on eagerly anticipating a record that reflected what the trio had discovered since Load Blown only to find that much of that album's fresh ideas had been jettisoned.  The only breakthrough here is the group's new conciseness, with no track going beyond seven minutes in duration - and sitting over four sides, the vinyl-owning fan will find themselves getting up to turn the discs over way too quickly. 

There is little actually bad about REPO, but it is just a remarkably unremarkable Black Dice record and nobody beyond the band's most dedicated fans will find it a required purchase - newcomers to the band should be directed toward, well, pretty much any of the other albums.  The overwhelming feeling is that the group are running low on ideas and will see interest in them dwindle unless they introduce some outside influence (a new producer or some remixes perhaps?). It is a shame that for a band whose imperative is to be driven by new experiences, Black Dice have made a record that is running on empty. 

-Jeremy Bye