Like Portishead’s skulk back out of the shadows with Third, Massive Attack resurfacing to curate Meltdown, or (trippier if not hoppier) Dirty Den reappearing after his assassination by daffodil a decade previously, here is a comeback I didn’t foresee.  After a couple of utterly sui generis records on the Aphex Twin’s Rephlex and XL in the late ‘90s, Leila Arab has hopped back on her bike for another crack.  And she won’t let the small matter of being booed by some brain-dead Bjork fans deter her either.

As it shuffles back onto the set, Blood, Looms and Blooms retains some vague resemblance of those previous records Like Weather and Courtesy Of Choice.   This is most obviously true when Luca Santucci drifts into view to sing “Teases Me”, but is even so during the off-kilter space-pop of the Terry Hall showcase “Time To Blow”.  There is a wee bit more to this album though, and this is clear from the awesome opener that Leila has – like her contemporaries – been maturing excellently over the years; she has absorbed some of the same influences.  That track “Mollie” allows its mixture of vocal samples to be submerged under tweets, beats and dizzying noise until it is positively claustrophobic.  The noise is upped further on “Mettle”, with its menacing guitars recalling Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album – a distant cousin, perhaps.  The guitars resurface to propel the already faster-and-catchier-than-Jonty Rhodes “Deflect”.  Elsewhere, the joy of the kid-cod-reggae on “Daisies, Cats and Spacemen” more than makes up for the superfluousness of the Beatles cover “Norwegian Wood”.

The diversity of the material on Blood, Looms and Blooms may be evidence that Leila has been keeping an eye on the recent output of her mate Bjork too, although Leila’s arguably more avant-garde leanings mean it would be highly fanciful thinking for this to attain the same kind of reach as say, Volta.  Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly welcome return for someone who we thought had fallen in the great trip-hop wars a decade ago.