James Holden finally drops the second album of his career, some seven years after his accomplished debut 'The Idiots Are Winning'. The Inheritors finds him showing off his newly developed mastery of MAX/MSP and modular synthesis, and across its whopping fifteen track duration there's space for him to indulge his love of far more than techno: witness the very British prog-jazz stomp of 'The Caterpillar's Intervention', the krautrock mannerisms of 'Rannoch Dawn' and 'Circle Of Fifths', the almost freeform noise of 'Sky Burial'. And while of course the album has a backbone of classic Holden, 'Sky Was Pink'-style art-trance ('Some Respite', 'Blackpool Late Eighties', 'Renata' - the latter couldn't sound more Border Community if it tried), it is, in the final analysis, an adventurous and risk-taking record, highly likely to blow the minds of BC fans and at the very least impress the less committed
