Hands in the air if any of the following mean anything to you. Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator. Or Solo Electric Bass 1. Or even Numbers Lucent, Just A Souvenir or Hello Everything. Come on, let’s be seeing you…

Top marks to those currently experiencing a feeling of blood loss in their fingers – they’re the last five records Tom Jenkinson a.k.a. Squarepusher has fathered since 2004’s much celebrated Ultravisitor, widely regarded as his last big statement. But those with their arms by their sides shouldn’t be chastised as dunces. There’s something particularly strange about Squarepusher’s at once prolific and also quite understated way of working that makes his career path a rather difficult one to follow.

Maybe it’s down to a lack of coherence. Whilst the variety of music across those releases mentioned proves that Tom Jenkinson can pretty much do whatever he wants with sound – full-on raves, bafflingly intricate polyrhythmic percussion workouts, unashamedly masturbatory exercises with a bass guitar, whatever – they don’t always make for superb records. His credentials as a bona fide musical genius having already been proven before the arrival of Ultravisitor, he seems to have spent the last eight years convincing people that, yes, he is probably the best bass player in the whole world, and yes, he does really really really like jazz, but no, he’s never having any more fun than when playing loud acid house in a holiday camp to the people of All Tomorrow’s Parties. For the gig-going Squarepusher fan, that’s been a blast. To the more CD-inclined or casual admirer, it’s made for an interesting if not consistently pleasurable few releases.

Ufabulum hangs together better than most Squarepusher releases in the last ten years by virtue of the fact that it does something we’ve not come to expect from Tom Jenkinson. Let me clarify. Whilst we do indeed anticipate Tom Jenkinson doing the unexpected (solo albums consisting of just him on a bass guitar and records dripping with elegant jazz are things he’s done when we’ve expected him to, y’know, make dance music), we’re now kinda used to the fact that whatever comes next will probably be the sound of him pushing himself, often more than we might want him to. Ufabulum, though, is the first Squarepusher album in a good while that sounds a hell of a lot like a Squarepusher album: an old one, with all the charm of the kid-messing-about-with-IDM-and-breakbeat-in-his-room feeling that his early records possessed. Nope. Didn’t see that coming.

Whilst it might be the most backward facing of his records of late, this stuff certainly isn’t phoned in. On the contrary, Ufabulum’s finest moments are up there with the peaks of his dozen or so albums, striking a delightful middle ground between melodies that are desperate to kick off their shoes and set up home in your brain and rhythms that are so intelligent that often all you can do when confronted with a particularly juicy break or leftfield percussive turn is burst into laughter. A few early cases in point – the eventual arrival of opener ‘4001’’s main hook is the kind of demented pleasure you only get from Squarepusher, and the following 64-bit video game melody of ‘Unreal Square’ introduces the ridiculous to the sublime.

In general, it’s a lot easier to keep up with him when his concerns are melodic more than rhythmic (as on the joyous romp of ‘Energy Wizard’). Middle ground like ‘Stadium Ice’ exists and serves as the album’s greatest success, but it’s things like ‘The Metallurgist’ that cause a slight problem – there’s clearly some serious intellectual muscle being flexed here, but its bombastic beat barrage marks a point in the record where bombastic beat barrages seem to be all that’s left (‘Drax 2’ and ‘Dark Steering’ make for a particularly punishing couple from which the album never really recovers). The listener stops having fun along the way, a problem only exacerbated by the thought that Squarepusher definitely doesn’t.

Also, we have heard him do this kind of thing before – nods to Ultravisitor, Go Plastic and Do You Know Squarepusher abound, and those are all slightly superior albums to Ufabulum. To make a record that bears such a resemblance to its predecessors will only ever seem like a curious turn in a career like Squarepusher’s that has been so defined by pushing boundaries. But hey, this is bona fide musical genius Tom Jenkinson – no matter what we crave from him, there’s something great about knowing that whatever his next release sounds like, it’ll sound like whatever he wants.