New Record, Re-invented Sound
Following the success of their debut record Crooks & Lovers, Mount Kimbie release a new long player to the excitement of Somethingyousaid.com’s Carol Bowditch.
When I first heard Crooks & Lovers, it was like a whole new genre of music had slapped me in the face. The British band used bleeps covered in this dense lo-fi coating, each song sounded as if I were hearing it from outside thick walls of a club, while treading underwater. The organic, calming quality that made up Crooks & Lovers had me excited for the follow up release, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth.
What I like about listening to Mount Kimbie’s music is attempting to isolate samples in the songs and link them to sounds of life. In Home Recording, it’s as if the breaking swell of the ocean is forming the back-beat; this is followed with a faraway organ sound, all the while vocalist softly delivers the vocals.
Track two is a surly spoken-word number. Much like that James Blake song that I have been listening to on repeat, Take A Fall For Me , which features RZA on vocals, the hip hop element of You Took Your Time shows that the band are discovering new ways to deliver their sound through the enlistment of King Krule taking care vocal duties on this song. Krule features on another track on the album, and both inclusions are a little random in the mix sonically, but this is a bit of a cut and paste album in terms of mixed genre borrowed sounds.
Blood and Form features familiar bleeps to a marching beat with warped vocals, the harsh, dark sound is a little anxiety inducing. It’s a pretty angry song.
A standout track on the album is definitely Made to Stray. It is a very high-intensity song that could easily be transferred into a club environment. I was surprised at the high-level of production of the song, the beats are clean and precise, and as a whole it creates a weird immediate need to move one’s body.
On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth there isn’t really a sense of fluidity, there are tangents into hip hop and hard dance that break up the eleven-track longplayer. Some tracks aren’t what I recognise to be Mount Kimbie’s sound but, in saying that, their previous offering was very gritty and to re-create that sound again it would make for a pretty dull, un-inventive follow-up. What resonates throughout the newest album is higher production resulting in a more refined sound. It may not be as groundbreaking as Crooks & Lovers was, but it’s still an interesting listen.
Words by Carol Bowditch.
