Take My Breath Away

I spent yesterday morning exploring Southend-on-Sea. It was a blustery day on that grey bit of the coast but in my waxed jacket and with my headphones on I felt perfectly insulated from the gales and the occasional peppering of rain. Making my way along the neglected seafront I decided to take another step in my recently-undertaken mission to educate myself about techno, and Gui Boratto's second album, Take My Breath Away, is what accompanied me along that bleak coastal ramble.

The title track opens the album expertly, the rising notes of the melody warm and hopeful. It's a real builder, coming on in waves but not losing its insistent but understated rhythm. It drops off but resurges, more intense than before, creating an urgency that sets the tone for the rest of the album. No Turning Back, on which Boratto's wife sings, brings in guitar sounds and a pop aesthetic that may be anathaema to the serious techno fan but the vocals are spare enough not to be overly naff and the song feels consistent with Boratto's direction.

The brilliant Ballroom has a clubbier vibe, with warm, pulsating bass and a driving rhythm. Its echoey, reverberating sounds evoke balls ricocheting around a room and colliding with pipes and hard surfaces, creating a real impression of depth and space. Les Enfants exhibits a similar ludic industrial sound. If you ever played The Chaos Engine on the Sega Mega Drive and remember its brilliant soundtrack then you'll love this number. It's warm, rich and expansive but simultaneously mechanical and glitchridden, like an enormous steampunk factory running on burning coal but producing flying robots.

As someone who tends towards the darker end of the electronic music scale, this album is an unusually uplifting choice for me, with the poppiness of No Turning Back echoed elsewhere in the album, such as in the twinkly and reassuring Besides. But where it allows itself to be sweet and setimental, it rescues itself with a playful benevolence that gives a nod to Richard D. James Album, noticeable on tracks like Eggplant and Azzurra. And it doesn't lack punch. In fact, what marks this album is its tremendous balance. Its moods are various but there is real cohesion and polish to it, perhaps thanks to Boratto's impressive production résumé.

Take My Breath Away is an album that immediately appealed to me, thanks to great hooks supported by nuanced rhythms and structures. It may not be the hard core of techno, but there's enough going on to keep the listener interested and I can see minimal tracks Opus 17 and first single Atomic Soda providing just as fitting a soundtrack to a thudding night out in a noisy urban kaleidoscope as they did to a long walk along a grey stretch of cold estuary mud.