Fred Again Pours Out Another Batch of Gloriously Sad Bangers With ‘Ten Days’: Album Review

Fred Gibson was already a successful pop songwriter when his galvanizing trilogy of “Actual Life” albums began emerging in surprisingly rapid succession as the pandemic lifted. Released over just 18 months, the albums were a sort of living musical diary, filled with sophisticated dance/house/electronic-leaning sounds but also a sense of emotion and songcraft rare for the genre, which usually tends to be production-based more than song-based. Built around voice notes from himself and friends, internet posts and samples of other artists’ work, Fred’s musicality, gently pulsating beats and melancholic songwriting — he’s cowritten hits for Ed Sheeran, Rita Ora and others, and was mentored by his childhood neighbor, Brian Eno — made many of these digitally based songs as vividly human as any singer-songwriter’s.

Gibson’s star deservedly rose quickly as those albums sunk in, and he’s been on a sort of collaboration binge ever since, playing roof-raising DJ sets at Madison Square Garden and Coachella with Skrillex and Four Tet, collaborating on entire albums with them, as well as Eno and Romy from the XX, and dropping stray tracks or remixes or features seemingly every month. As powerful and emotional as those efforts are, it seemed like an outsized, almost too-happy Fred Again — and to be fair, it’s hard to be intimate and vulnerable when you’ve got to move a crowd that wants to dance.

Well, take heart, sad Fred fans, because although “Ten Days” isn’t officially part of the “Actual Life” series, it very much carries on in their style — due (or thanks) to a breakup, according to a long Instagram post Fred uploaded on the morning after this album’s release. It’s so of a piece with those albums that in places it feels repetitive at times, but other tracks find him refining that multifaceted template into mesmerizing new shapes — and with an unexpected set of new collaborators (nearly every song has at least one featured artist).

Most surprising is country legend Emmylou Harris, although her voice is almost unrecognizable on “Where Will I Be”; it sounds like she’s either singing in a much lower register than usual, or Fred slowed down the recording of her vocal.

Even the most energetic track here — the pulsating “Places to Be,” a fast, percolating banger with an exuberant vocal from Anderson .Paak — has a melancholy chord structure and cloudy synthesizer textures. Best of all is the closing track, “Backseat,” a collaboration with Japanese House (British singer Amber Bain) featuring music by the late American DJ Scott Hardkiss with a wild caterwauling vocal melody, at least some of which seems to be played backwards. Elsewhere, “I Saw You” is one of the most affecting ballads he’s ever released.

And while much of the music here will sound familiar to fans, Gibson is morphing it into new shapes throughout the album — he floats almost Phillip Glassian textures on “Just Stand There” and “Glow” (the latter a collaboration with Skrillex and/or Four Tet, both of whom contribute to several tracks on the album).

While “Ten Days” is as full of collaborations and other voices as the multiple projects he’s released since the last installment of “Actual Life,” it truly feels like a return to his greatest strengths.