Thievery Corporation

A funny thing happens when you listen to Thievery Corporation’s latest, The Cosmic Game, for the third or fourth time. Your attitude shifts from one of, “God, when are these guys going to do anything different?” to one of, “God, why can’t anyone else make a chillout album this good?” Thievery Corporation have become downtempo electronica’s most reliable brand, and with their fourth studio album, they continue their streak.

There are a few surprises on The Cosmic Game, most notably the increased use of big-name guest vocalists. The album’s opener, “Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun),” sounds exactly like what you’d expect a collaboration between the Flaming Lips and Thievery Corporation to sound like, all dreamy post-Floyd ambiance and Wayne Coyne obliquity, while “Revolution Solution” is a stunner, a dubby cut featuring an unrecognizable Perry Farrell doing a dead-on Rastafarian vocal. Both are mesmerizing, but the David Byrne-led “The Heart’s a Lonely Hunter” suffers from the same watered-down Afro-Caribbean vibe that has marred much of Byrne’s solo work.

The vocal contributor who leaves the most indelible mark is Gunjan, a superstar in India but virtually unknown to American audiences. She sings on four tracks and shines on all of them, especially the hauntingly beautiful “Shiva” and “Warning Shots,” a cross-cultural track that artfully blends East Indian and Jamaican grooves.

Elsewhere, The Cosmic Game takes all of the favorite pages from Thievery Corporation’s well-thumbed world beat atlas -- dub/reggae, bossa nova, samba, trip-hop, all given a slightly more psychedelic sheen this time around than on past albums. They save their best surprise for next-to-last -- a dreamy piece of Bacharach-style pop featuring Thievery’s longtime French vocalist Loulou singing in fetchingly accented English. It’s the sweetest, most playful song the Thieves have ever recorded, and together with the aptly named closing instrumental, “A Gentle Dissolve,” it ends this relatively somber album on a welcome warm note.

If Thievery Corporation’s latest doesn’t break much new ground, well, you can hardly fault them for that -- this is still an act that has many imitators but no equals. - Andy Hermann

The ingredients -- electronic beats, dub, soft Brazilian tones, sitars, and women singing in foreign languages -- are entirely the same, but Thievery Corporation have never sounded so genuine. Despite the same old sound and a busy release schedule leading up to it, The Cosmic Game comes across as fresh as a debut and surprisingly indifferent toward being the in thing. What it is is music for music's sake, all laid out with the utmost care, giving listeners a fully thought-out album that makes the "forward" button on your CD player purposeless. Effortlessly flowing from the indie-grooving "Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun)" with the Flaming Lips to reggae to samba to psychedelia and beyond, the album is trimmed of all fat. Instrumentals with clever grooves sometimes overstayed their welcome on previous Thievery albums, but here they're whittled down to interludes when need be and positioned as chillout segues between the more striking numbers. The druggy, Perry Farrell-inna-reggae-style "Revolution Solution" is one of these stunners, but the superstars don't own all the highlights. As dank, Jamaican-flavored horns echo into the distance, siren Sista Pat lures listeners into the deep world of "Wires and Watchtowers" while soulful crooner Notch takes things uptown on the cool "Amerimacka" before the Corp turn the tune into one of their stickiest dub outings yet. The pleasant "The Heart's a Lonely Hunter" deserves mention because David Byrne guests on vocals, and while it's very good, it's the most forgettable number on this outing. The track brings a very slight reminder of when Thievery Corporation have let ambition trump the meaningful and meaty, but the otherwise purposeful and certain Cosmic Game is so darkly delicious you have to admit it's their masterwork. ~ David Jeffries, All Music Guide