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Mount Kimbie are as soon as once more searching for transformation. Over the previous 15 years, the UK duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos have swerved from post-dubstep to post-punk, techno to R&B, ambient storage to lo-fi pop, releasing DJ mixes and double albums, collaborating with James Blake and Jay-Z and King Krule and Travis Scott. Now they’re again with one thing barely completely different: a gritty, shoegazy, post-rock album known as The Sundown Violent. With assist from new bandmembers Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, Mount Kimbie mud off their guitars and switch up their distortion, hoping to change into Stereolab for a brand new era, an electro-rock outfit whose work is as acquainted as it’s obscure.
The highway to Mount Kimbie’s revised sound has been winding. As underground digital producers within the early 2010s, Maker and Campos’ experimental aptitude punctuated in any other case minimalist compositions: a time-warped acoustic guitar behind glassy ambient pads, arhythmic drums round synth keys. Their most up-to-date album, 2022’s MK 3.5: Die Cuts | Metropolis Planning, branched off into hazy R&B and hip-hop earlier than morphing into muted, dubby membership beats. Their defining work stays 2017’s Love What Survives, a new-age post-punk document heavy on overdriven guitars and grainy synths, a mode well-suited to Maker and Compos’ recurring muffled abstraction.
Sleeker and safer than its predecessor, The Sundown Violent equally gives a sturdy backdrop of fuzzy guitar and Korgs for Balency-Béarn and Maker’s melancholic vocals. The newly constituted four-piece seems like if Sonic Youth or Younger Marble Giants have been wizards with the DAW, a band whose songs play like richly detailed desires whose that means might go away you scratching your head.
The strongest songs sparkle with a morose appeal. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck,” Balency-Béarn’s plainspoken singing wafts over murky lounge-pop, giving The Sundown Violent some much-needed friction. “Every single day we’re consuming out/One other date I’ll kill myself,” she deadpans on “Dumb Guitar.” Her wistful, unadorned voice is the closest factor the album has to an emotional heart, particularly with Maker taking part in the guileless sidekick function Oliver Sims perfected in the xx. It’s jarring to listen to how rather more alive King Krule’s baritone sounds on “Boxing” and “Empty and Silent,” how a lot defter his pen—a shocking feat for such a famed curmudgeon. Typically The Sundown Violent searches excessive and low for a pulse and simply comes up empty.
Maker’s at his most assured on the spectacular “Fishbrain,” a track that blisters with bitterness and remorse. The writing is cryptic however sharp, that includes fractured traces about bridges falling and “operating out of movies” to observe. When Mount Kimbie align their songcraft with a rigidity, a sense, a perspective—irrespective of how prosaic or subliminal—their songs soar. It’s after they languish in repetitive patterns and dry melodies, like on “Received Me” and the opening half of “A Determine within the Surf,” that they’re yanked again to earth.
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