Is Thomas Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, getting friendly?

His last album, Ultravisitor, was a dark, brooding and difficult summation of his career as the master of jazz-tinged electronica spazz-outs. It was brilliant and harsh: He’d lull the listener with pastoral classical guitar picking (“Andrei”), and then a few tracks later drop what sounded a lot like a computerized jackhammer right next to their eardrums (“An Arched Pathway”). The album cover was a mugshot of Jenkinson giving you a cold stare, and he called Ultravisitor “my spectacle of beauty and terror.” Definitely not a friendly album.

But things are different on the new Squarepusher record. The title is cheerful: Hello Everything. The cover is a grid of warm photos showing Jenkinson’s hands on studio instruments. And the music is the sound of Jenkinson emerging from the murk of his last album and greeting the world with a set of downright pleasant versions of the hyperspeed drum ‘n’ bass that he’s known for.

At first listen, Hello Everything sounds like a return to form for Squarepusher. The songs are dense and beat-filled, as on 1996’s Hard Normal Daddy. The production is identical to 2001’s Go Plastic: The percussion thwacks instead of thumps, and the keyboard tones are clean. But Hello Everything isn’t a complete retread, and the tracks show Jenkinson using his sonic vocabulary to express new musical ideas.

Take “The Modern Bass Guitar.” It starts off with a fast call-and-response beat that’s almost exactly the same as the one from “Come On My Selector,” the mischievous opener on 1997’s Big Loada. But while “Come On My Selector” used laser-gun blasts to chase around a squeaky-toy noise, “The Modern Bass Guitar” is built upon a catchy theme that anchors the song when it melts into squealing delirium.

“Rotate Electrolyte” zaps the listener with an electronic drone, then drops into an understated jungle beat. Disparate rhythmic elements are added in, and an old-school siren is answered by metallic plinking and video-game squiggles. It gets busy, but then the entire arrangement falls away for a soft keyboard interlude. Then the song zaps the listener again, the beat comes back, but instead of rebuilding with the earlier rhythms, Jenkinson lays on melody. He brings back the extra percussion from before but does it slowly, building tension leading to a climax that never comes. Instead, he peels it all away again and ends the song with a calming, synthesized orchestra.

Four of the tracks on Hello Everything show off Jenkinson’s jazz roots by having him playing live drums, a technique he first explored on 1998’s Music Is Rotted One Note. The songs were dark and serpentine, but the live-percussion tracks on Hello Everything go down easy. “Plotinus” uses the drumming as a launching point for another harrowing break-beat adventure, but “Theme from Sprite,” “Bubble Life,” and “Circlewave 2,” keep Jenkinson on the drum kit for their entire durations. “Theme From Sprite” is all bass-funk swagger, “Bubble Life” is outfitted with, well, bubbles to sound like an underwater jazz club, and “Circlewave 2” swells with picturesque keyboard chiming.

Songs like those succeed the same way Squarepusher songs have always succeeded: by evolving melodically and rhythmically. The trouble with Hello Everything is that a few tracks forget half of that equation.

Opener “Hello Meow” exemplifies this model. Jenkinson starts immediately with a basic drum pattern laced with a squelching keyboard scale. Then he layers on a couple different flavors of synthesized melodies before throwing in more interlocking – but unchanging – drum machines, a xylophone, and computerized strings. Toward the end, Jenkinson takes out his bass guitar, plays a funky solo, and then brings the entire thing back to a celestial coda that could replace the music playing during Disneyland’s Space Mountain ride.

It sounds cool, but it also sounds like something anyone with Jenkinson’s arsenal of equipment and a flair for the dramatic could pull off. That’s how it works on “Planetarium” and “Welcome to Europe” as well. They’re not bad songs – at first listen, they’re actually the standouts because they all reach shimmering, viscerally pleasing crescendos. But their modus operandi is to simply build, build, build, throwing away the replay value that the best Squarepusher songs possess.

Three of the tracks on Hello Everything are completely skippable. “Vacuum Garden” is six minutes of dime-a-dozen rising ambient drone, fit only to be played in the background of a tense sci-fi movie. “Cronecker King” is 48 seconds of messed-with live drums and a wispy organ. It could have potentially been expanded into a full song, but as it stands isn’t worth listening to more than a few times. The album’s closer, “Orient Orange,” is nearly 11 minutes long, but so little happens that it’s impossible to pay attention to it.

Many listeners won’t even notice the throwaways, since Hello Everything tends to blur together into one frenetic mass. To die-hard fans, Hello Everything satisfies the Squarepusher fix, but doesn’t really deliver on the promise of Ultravisitor. The new album isn’t really epic, spacious or challenging; instead of delving into unexplored musical terrain, Jenkinson is remapping grounds he’s already conquered. Maybe that’s because he needed a break from the “terror” of Ultravisitor. Whatever the reason, Hello Everything will likely bring Squarepusher a new following: To those who haven’t entered Jenkinson’s world of spastic beats and unforgettable melodies, the album’s glittering heights and accessible rhythms form the perfect hello.