innesota native Andrew Broder tried the punk rock thing. He tried hip hop DJ-ing. He even planted a foot in the post rock camp, courtesy of the band Lateduster. But it fell to London label Ninja Tune, more renowned for its association with DJs and trip hop, to re-configure and re-release Broder’s debut as Fog to a worldwide audience. For two years the album had been stuck in limbo, until kindred spirit Dose One of Anticon introduced him into the right circles. And with Fog perhaps he has found his calling in life - to make genre-smashing turntablist guitar tunes, shrouded in darkness, sadness and tarnished joy.


The opener ‘A Word of Advice’ is the standard creed intro. Guest MF Doom intones something like Sun-Tzu stalking the cold, hard street; setting you up for the clichéd and thumping rap follow up. But then again this is no ordinary album. Instead you get 'The Smell of Failure' - what would happen if Mogwai had decided to drown Without Portfolio with scratchy distortion and unintelligible, cut up vocal samples. There’s a palpable sense of unease and ominous doom induced in the listener. Then, another swerve into oncoming traffic.


‘Pneumonia’ is the album’s standout. A country tinged blast of catharsis detailing Broder’s own struggle with the illness, its lyrics veer from the mundane into the poignant in a microsecond - ‘the casserole was good and the drives were so nice, welcome to the worst part of your life’. And while Broder’s fraying, Neil Young-ish tones uncoil, a virtuoso turntablist performance, summoning up a theremin-like sound that is manipulated, stretched and stunted to fantastic effect, takes us to the end.


As befitting his moniker, Broder builds up a dusky and hazy collage, a result of what he called ‘an epiphany’ after realising his original intention to make a scratch album was transforming into an ‘in a bad place’ album. Certainly, the instrumentals are the weaker, less enthralling part of the deal, their vocal led counterparts, far more adept at getting their dirty hooks into you. "Fuckedupfuckfuckup" is aimless and annoying while ‘Staring at the Dashboard’ is plodding aural sludge. Broder’s overwhelming honesty, however, does more than enough to unite the whole and cover up the bumps and uneasy diversions. Songs such as "Glory", where Dose One's croaky then gasping vocal underpins a lazily beautiful soundscape as a cello emerges to play teary havoc with your mental state, have the emotional ballast to fully penetrate the consciousness.


A seemingly infinite parade of references spring to mind: The Notwist, Will Oldham, Kid Koala, Beck, DJ Shadow, Radiohead and a dozen more but of course none of them ring true. Broder has made something that can’t be hastily dumped in an easily marked pigeonhole. Above all it shows the strait-jacketed rock masses that decks are a remarkable instrument in itself, as expressive as the good old drums or guitars.


The restless Broder can’t see the problem with shredding flavours as disparate as folk, rock, post-rock, the avant-garde, hip hop, electronica into a powerful, sometimes jarring, sometimes bewitching pulp, and neither should any music fan. Listen and free your mind from convention.