Jill Fraser: Earthly Pleasures (Drag City Records)

In recent times, the crate-digging fraternity (who are maybe running out of new genres to revive) have picked up on New Age synth music, a once-derided genre, in a big way. Decades-old recordings by a raft of exploratory, spiritually-inclined artists have been brought to the public's attention, their home recordings and private pressings reissued and often reviewed favourably. This makes a lot of sense: in our alienated, traumatised late capitalist era, depression and anxiety levels have gone through the roof. While some modern ambient music (eg. Oneohtrix Point Never) is positively sinister-sounding, any music that aims to salve the soul is in high demand. And nowadays in the West, the function performed by much sacred music - once a communal activity - has been privatised and commodified. Alongside yoga, meditation, visualisation et al, why not let the latest Light in the Attic compilation reduce your stress levels? Even the BBC makes meditation podcasts nowadays...

Enter Jill Fraser. She has been musically active since the 1970s, a former student of John Cage who has opened for punk icons such as Henry Rollins and composed film scores with the late great Jack Nitzsche (the real genius behind Spector's Wall of Sound). Earthly Pleasures, her new work, uses classic retro modular synths to reversion old American revival hymns for today. Can she maintain their sense of awe and wonder, or is much lost in translation? And when so many of the parameters for this sort of music have been established, how does she make the pieces feel distinct, not generic?

Like the curate's egg, the album succeeds in parts. Shorter tracks, like Amen pts one and two, are interspersed with longer excursions. Ambient music is about establishing atmospheres, after all, and that takes time. Message of Mercy is 13 minutes long, while Monarch of the Sky is a touch off ten minutes. There are no beats but all the elements you'd expect from 70s analogue ambience: synth washes, whirrs, clicks, heavenly choirs, the occasional dissonant hum. It's an attempt to convey transcendent ideas and feelings that are beyond the realm of language. This is the modern version of baroque classical music - spacious, stately and designed for contemplation of the higher things.

The record is strongest when it inspires an epic sense of space, chords and voices hanging suspended like notes bathed in the acoustics of a great cathedral. The title track is lovely, tinkling keys and a heavenly choir murmuring in the background. Message of Mercy has parts that sound like early Orb. It's not all sweetness and light: Beautiful Summer throws some chaos into the mix, boings and sped-up chirruping making the track more like uneasy listening. And Monarch of the Sky, as its title suggests, gets positively bombastic with its choral surges. Other parts sound overly familiar: ten-minute opener When We All Get To Heaven goes nowhere slowly, while Amen 1 is charming but slight.

Overall, Earthly Pleasures has its moments but seems to be treading old ground sometimes. And if this critic hadn't been told it was a resetting of old hymns, he wouldn't have sussed it from the tunes themselves. So, a perfectly pleasant listen but not up there with the likes of Brian Eno, the first Orb album, the 70s German Kosmische gang or Underworld at their most atmospheric. 3/5