Imagine Phil Collins set adrift on a hostile alien world, with only his drum machines to punch his way through the terrain. Erland Dahlen appears to have done just that with Clocks’ thickly textured arrays of rhythm instruments, ranging from 1930s WFL drums to their 1980s successors, and from cutlery to marbles. Dahlen has been a 21st century Norwegian fixture, with gigs ranging from Stian Westerhus to Nils Petter Molvær, to Hanne Hukkelberg’s experimental rock. This third wholly solo album aims at slow-burning ambient bombast, as on the burly ‘Bear’, in which the drum machines’ Rocky IV swings make cushioned, slow-motion impact, still glacially fading away as distorted electric guitars crank up. Other tracks take on their titles’ elemental characters (the remorseless Arctic icebreaker journey of ‘Ship’, the slithery ‘Lizard’). If nothing else, Dahlen proves that the drum thunder whose briefly radical effect disfigured a recording era can now be legitimate, not just pastiche (you could say much the same for this album’s Mellotron). It gives an element of direct pop action to his swirling avant-garde atmospheres.