Album Review : Mount Kimbie - Crooks And Lovers
- Written by Rory Gibb
When I interviewed Mount Kimbie’s Dominic Maker a couple of months ago, we discussed the hypnotic, loop-heavy nature of the duo’s music, and how their sound developed into the distinctive creature it is on their debut album. Far from being a melancholy process, Maker explained, the strongly defined sense of space and distance their music evokes came from the use of field recordings, heavy clouds of reverb – to obscure the fact that “neither of us are particularly technically advanced at the guitar” – and the process of working their productions into a form suited to live performance. It shows throughout the length of Crooks & Lovers, which takes the shape of a seamless live show, built with layers of microscopic loops stacked upon one another. It’s a fascinating direction for a group nurtured within the dubstep(ish) community to take, and the first high-profile full-length from that scene to splice the genre’s tonal and rhythmic tropes into a form recognisable as the work of a ‘band’, as opposed to that of a lone bedroom auteur.
As with so many of the dubstep scene’s progeny though, whether Mount Kimbie ever really deserved that tag, or the limiting stigma that went with it, is largely immaterial. As a UK-centred rave variant it’s had an uncommonly impressive album history, from the chrome-plated catharsis of Kode9 and the Spaceape’s Memories Of The Future to the introspective haze of Scuba’s Triangulation, but the ease with which each record can be taken on its own merits has proved a key factor in the genre’s success. Just look at Burial’s two records on Hyperdub for an example: lazily pegged as dubstep productions due to their label and his closest contemporaries, both stand closer to a defiantly individual reimagining of the fuzz and crackle of pirate airwaves, set entirely apart from everything and nothing all at once. So it is with Kimbie’s debut, which is both intrinsically linked to the sounds that inspired its basic shape and totally separate from them.
Its distinctive nature and surprising accessibility may well result in real commercial success, despite the fact that Crooks & Lovers is anything but a pop-influenced record. Its extended periods of elegiac drone, as well as an endearing tendency to set conflicting elements against one other until they simply wear away, betray a non-specific vision that’s more in common with the dreamscape explorations of US bands like Emeralds, Sun Araw or even Ariel Pink than their dancefloor-driven contemporaries. Midstream two-stepper ‘Carbonated’ thrums with the tensile, elastic energy of a packed rave crowd, but is constantly subverted by fizzing bubbles of static and muted synth, and a track like ‘Ruby’ is all about implication, suggesting more by what’s not present than by what little there actually is.
At thirty-five minutes in length, Crooks & Lovers is a relatively brief foray, consisting of a series of tiny snapshots that together make up a particular vision. It’s a little like a collage – another factor that pulls them into line with the sonic cut ‘n’ paste of early Ariel Pink – made up of fragments that could almost pass as nuggets of perfect pop. But played off against one another these pieces do little more than suggest a love of pop’s melodic and structural tendencies. The fact that its occasionally disjointed nature adds to its charm is entirely a good thing, and works as a powerful binding agent for the album as a whole. Just as their earlier EPs toyed with ideas of cognitive dissonance and circular narrative, Crooks & Lovers comes across as surprisingly literate for a largely wordless album, its repetitive nature and short bookend tracks strongly suggest an unending, ongoing story, of which what you can hear is only a part. It’s short – and good - enough to whet the appetite for more of the saga, and you sense that neither Mount Kimbie, nor the majority of the new listeners they’re sure to pick up over the next few months, care where anyone intends to pigeonhole them.