This doesn't just balance: It walks the tightrope.
Recorded between 2003 and 2007 in Edwards's London pad, 'Balance' is a professional, slick and grown-up debut album. Each note has been carefully considered, the choice of every instrument is resolutely deliberate, every drum lick is purposefully premeditated and perhaps even the intermissions of silence between each track were calculated in an identical manner.
That's no surprise - as Edwards counts American composer and minimalist Harold Budd as a key influence - and makes my use of "calculated" a rather perfect adjective in reference to 'Balance'. Rather like a Stanley Kubrick movie or a Heston Blumenthal gateau, Edwards has manifestly invested a huge amount of effort in crafting his ultimate musical statement. And while it is exquisite listening, it's also, and unfortunately, rather sterile too.
Although all instruments were played and recorded live (save the drum machine) - and in real time (due to Edwards's detestation of Pro-Tools - an opinion with which I am in complete acquiescence), it's impossible not to feel the sheen, the intangibility and the synthetic component parts of the piece, rather than the lush, rich and redolent emotions that the record no doubt intends to conjure.
'On Your Own' is as close to Air as you would believe bearable but before you lose all faith, there are pockets of genuinely astonishing work - rare punctums in an album of studiums if you will (if you're not familiar with Barthes, get your coat and I'll see you in detention).
The rasping synth of 'It Might Happen' is almost sadistically exquisite; the rattling percussion within 'Look' sounds like a bag of washers and screws being thrown around a building site and the industrial metallic crunch of 'Aviva Hotel' is as daring as it is dazzling.
In at least one way, Edwards's approach is akin to that of Andy Summers: creating soundscapes - multi-layered, detailed, savage-yet-beautiful spaces that challenge the listener to deconstruct, to probe and to appreciate. Edwards is only partly successful. There's no bone behind the meat. If you strip away the flesh, you'll find you weren't eating a drumstick at all - it was only a chicken dipper. And there, ladies and gentlemen is the rub.
I'll be the first to admit that 'Balance' is at first listen, a hypnotic, majestically magnetic piece but listen again, and it blends together like a banana smoothie in a colostomy bag.
It's obvious that 'Balance' should be absorbed as a whole, rather than track-by-track (a rather obvious difference between this album and say, anything by the aforementioned Air, Röyksopp or Moby, is the absence of a single stand-out tune - but the more you listen, the more desensitised you become - and it becomes harder to differentiate the truly great moments from the rank-and-file.
Edwards describes the closer 'Noel Gallagher Lives His Dream' as "featuring exactly the kind of chord sequence that Noel Gallagher likes to use for Oasis choruses". It doesn't. Sorry - but it just doesn't. But that's no great shame, because it is a shimmering and ethereal slideaway into silence that concludes the disc rather beautifully and makes you wish you were wrapped up in bed with a box of Cadbury's Roses, watching John Cusack bewitch Ione Skye into fucking him on the backseat of her car while Peter Gabriel screams away on the radio. Well, to me that's beautiful anyway - but feel free to substitute it with Patrick Swayze getting taunted with the line "I used to fuck guys like you in prison" in 'Road House' if you must.
'Balance' is well worthy of investigation but you may well feel rather unfulfilled afterwards. It's a bit like eating a Fry's Turkish Delight: a brief and shatteringly wondrous experience that soon gives way to regret and the wish that you'd bought a King Size Twix instead.