Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase

For their third album Boards Of Canada picked up guitars. It sounds like a small change and it was not. The Campfire Headphase takes the acoustic strum that had been lurking at the edges of their earlier work and puts it at the centre, then drags it through the same tape machines and detuning that made the duo's name. The result is the warmest record in their catalogue and, for a long time, the most divisive.

"Dayvan Cowboy" is the track that settled the argument. Built from a slow swell of guitar and drums that arrives like weather, it became the band's best-loved single and the one that reliably converts newcomers. Elsewhere "Chromakey Dreamcoat" and "Satellite Anthem Icarus" work the old magic of melodies that feel half-remembered rather than newly written, and "'84 Pontiac Dream" packs an entire summer into two minutes. "Farewell Fire" closes the album by simply dissolving.

Twenty years on, the guitars no longer sound like a departure. They sound like the moment the group found a way to make hauntology feel lived in rather than merely nostalgic.

Official Warp Records repress across two LPs, cut at the length the material needs and housed in the original artwork. A catalogue staple that goes out of print more often than it should.