Debut album from Bracken, the shrouded-in-mystery solo venture from Chris Adams,vocalist and sound designer behind UK post rock band Hood (Domino Records). Bracken walks that rarely tread turf between the electronic and the organic. Bloops, beeps,squelches of strings and heavydub bass reign supreme with Adams wonderfully wrecked, world-weary voice right at home in the mix. Lead single Heathens opens with a breathy, ethereal voice before catching melody and bouncing down a hallway of deep dub bump. Another highlight is Fight or Flight . Its gentle acoustic guitar, far off synths, and chopped up drum, violin, and vocal samples align to make a fiendishly compelling 6-minute song. It showcases the deep, multi-textual ambience & spaciousness of the Bracken sound. We Know About the Need is full of songs like this. Bracken utilizes the shoegaze-folk that has become his most notable association, but stripped of its clearly definable rock instrumentation and replaced with a barrage of samplers, analog machinery and tape manipulations. Not to say it is devoid of any traditional instrumentation, quite the contrary, but everything is routed through an array of archaic synthesizers and processors that only an audiophile could love. Adams crafts an album of rich, warm atmospheric sounds which combine the organic layers of Boards of Canada and the bizarre musique concr te of The Books, setting it upon a bed of deep, dubby bass which would be at home on a Mouse on Mars album, and adorning it with detached, reverb soaked vocals.