A stunning second set from Hiatus Kaiyote – a group we already loved the first time around, but who really blow us away with this amazing little record! The style is this incredible mix of cosmic keyboards and soulful vocals – but not in a way that's like any of the other oft-tread paths in that combination on the market at all.
Instead, the group almost put the keyboards first – working from some Herbie Hancock electric 70s mode, but very much with their own style – then find a key place for the sublime singing of Nai Palm – a vocalist who's got this style that's heavenly, and almost with her own sort of electricity as well. Individual tunes are great, but the whole thing really works together as one long sonic trip – a mindbending journey through tracks that include "Prince Minikid", "Shaolin Monk Motherfunk", "Laputa", "Borderline With My Atoms", "Swamp Thing", "Fingerprints", and "The Lung".
Paul Bender, the bassist with Melbourne’s “future soul” band Hiatus Kaiyote, describes his band’s second album Choose Your Weapon as a “huge, massive, complex puzzle”. He’s not far wrong. Over 18 tracks and 70 minutes, the four-piece touch upon modern jazz, polyrhythmic time structures, labyrinthine explorations of 1970s funk, scat-singing, samba, West African soul, pastoral prog rock in the style of Weather Report and Gentle Giant, sprawling electric fusion and elemental rhythms. Whether or not you want to unlock its mysteries is up to you.
In some places (Prince Minikid, the florid and ever-changing Atari) it feels like all those strange electronic flourishes that artists such as Beyoncé and Stevie Wonder (notably on Innervisions) use to fill the spaces between the chart-topping hits, and casually bewitch their fans. In others (the single Breathing Underwater) this is the sort of psychedelic mesmerising adventure land populated by similar exploratory jazz fusion artists such as Annette Peacock and Erykah Badu.
Much of this is down to the group’s main life force, Nai Palm (the stage name of Naomi Saalfield, whose voice and guitar twist and turn, swoop, dart and flutter through a bewildering array of supple melodies and counter-counter-harmonics and fitful key changes.
Other tracks have equally as exotic roots. Jekyll, featuring some virtuoso free jazz percussion from the drummer, Perrin Moss, and typically disorienting fills from the synthesiser-player, Simon Mavin, flusters and flurries, searching for some peace of mind. The trippy funk-soul throwback, Borderline With My Atoms, feels like the band is channelling 30 or 40 years of soul into a six-minute song.
The multi-instrumentalist/composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson lends his one-man orchestra to the expansive interlude The Lung. Molasses is musical treacle. Shaolin Monk Motherfunk is some weird-shit boogie. Only Time All the Time: Making Friends With Studio Owl is self-explanatory.
This album is the follow-up to Tawk Tomahawk, the 2013 debut which spawned the Q-Tip collaboration Nakamarra, the song that caused Hiatus Kaiyote to become the first ever Australian act to be nominated for an R&B Grammy. That one was recorded after the band had been together for six months. This one was put together after two world tours, and written everywhere.
Goddess alone knows what they’re going to be like after another five years.
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