The Range, Rap Class, Quarry, Tabor Dark @ Holocene

"Albums like Nonfiction, the first full-length from producer James Hinton (aka the Range), never get the credit they deserve: They're too neat, too industrious, too polite—too many of the qualities we look for in coworkers and roommates and not enough of the ones we look for in artists...Nonfiction isn't an album easily pegged to any scene or narrative currently circulating about electronic music. Its rhythms are rooted in hip-hop, drum & bass, and late-90s R&B, rendered on the scale of someone making music more for home listening than club play. Even at its busiest, the album feels tidy and compact, like the gears of a prewar pocketwatch...Nearly every track here is pretty, in the most conventional sense of the word. Soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars—if the sounds on Nonfiction showed up on your doorstep in the dead of night, you'd probably let them in without question...[the record] might inspire a slowly gestating admiration, the kind that doesn't surge like a fire but instead grows patiently, like a vine." - Pitchfork, Best New Music review