You can try to pin down what you are hearing with Amon Tobin, but it's tricky. One track, El Wraith, goes something like this: slowed down chanting, someone strumming a guitar seven miles down the road, a bent trumpet on helium and some castanets going down the plughole.
We haven't even got to the drums or the enormous barking dogs yet. You start to sound like Tobin's sometime collaborator Chris Morris, who might describe this as "a bomb made of jazz and feathers".
But Back from Out Where isn't a discordant mess. Tobin loves his big beats and widescreen orchestral samples, which work best when he keeps the speed down. There are plenty of familiar sounds - guitar licks, funky beats, techno synths - but they are surrounded by a kind of hallucination.
Something brooding always rumbles underneath and rattles grittily above. Nothing is left to chance, each sound shaped so that it blends into the next, however odd a pairing they would normally make. Deceptively straight up, but with a twist.
