Album Of The Week: Boards Of Canada Tomorrow’s Harvest

It's been the year of grand returns, of nerd-beloved touchstones coming back after long silences and cranking out the cohesive studio products that we'd learned to stop expecting from them long ago. Studio-rat geniuses who haven't given us proper albums in seven or nine or 22 years, people who'd been occupying themselves with side projects or terrible movies or Primal Scream third-guitar duties are suddenly leaving their studio-ratholes and letting us hear the mysterious platters that they'd been working on this whole time. And even more amazingly, nobody's given us a Chinese Democracy-level turd yet -- not even close. It's been working out. The two biggest-selling Billboard weeks of the year belong to Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk, and they earned those spots by putting together slick and luxurious pillow-disco masterworks. Meanwhile, My Bloody Valentine pulled off the impossible and released a palatable follow-up to Loveless, and the Knife released a sprawling, forbidding mass of corrosive noise-electro and post-gender agitprop and somehow managed not to chase off their entire audience. All of these artists are coasting at least a little bit, and nobody's managing (or, arguably, even trying) to outdo their past glories, but all these people have done great work and reminded us why we cared in the first place. At this rate, Dr. Dre will, with no warning, suddenly release Detox in August, and it'll actually be good. And Tomorrow's Harvest, the first new Boards Of Canada album in almost a decade, fits in quite nicely with the rest of them.