Hiatus Kaiyote - Choose Your Weapon - 2015 Neo Soul Downtempo 180 Grm 2LP
Hiatus Kaiyote Breathing Under Water
Hiatus Kaiyote Prince Minikid
Label: Music On Vinyl  MOVLP1422, Flying Buddha
Style: Neo Soul, Hip Hop, Alternative Rock
Hiatus Kaiyote, the Grammy-nominated four-piece band, returns in 2015 with Choose Your Weapon. The 18-track, 70-minute odyssey from the Melbourne, Australia-based band takes listeners on a journey through the group's self-created ecosystem, populated with songs each embodying its own mini-cinematic sonic soundscape. The album is the hotly anticipated follow-up to their celebrated 2013 debut album Tawk Tomahawk, which was championed by media and fellow artists including Questlove, Erykah Badu, Pharrell and Prince, among others.
When its opening chords hit, By Fire is sure bring on a rush of joyful familiarity. Serious Hiatus Kaiyote fans will already know it well from a certain 3 track EP, and after 12 idea-packed tracks its easy to feel a little lost inside Choose Your Weapon at this point. By Fire is an uptempo return home. Moss pushes and pulls the tempo at will, and Palms doubled vocal become a new instrument unto itself.
The weird orchestral spirit of Thundercat seems to looms over Prince Minikid as it pairs fluttery tremolo with twisting jazz counterpoint (somewhere the bassist is probably nodding along to this one as he dusts his collection of Dragonball Z toys). Abundant in vibe, a spooky cut done just right, Minikid is essentially an on your marks for what comes next.
. Choose Your Weapon
With its THX-inspired aural bloom, the records title track is the sound of an adventure booting up. As a childs toy declares The Kaiyotes goes
, out of the drift a gritty beat arrivesa jostling knock the likes of which have by now become the bands signature cry. Video game start screen voices add to the virtualness of it all. We are about to dash off into something wild.
Shaolin Monk Motherfunk
Choose Your Weapons first proper track opens from far-off but quickly turns hyper-present and as lead singer Nai Palm invites us in, singing of clasped palms as we drop into the music. Shaolin opens like the Hiatus Kaiyote take on vintage jazzPaul Benders walking bassline punched by drummer Perrin Mosss old-school swing, which hes cut and pasted off the ride cymbal and onto his snare and hi-hat. By the time the band leans back into a lush Afropop groove, CYWs nature is already clear: this is an album thats flooded with ideas. It eagerly swaps from one to the next, assigning the listener a sonic endurance test. While the songs on Tawk Tomahawk tended to peak and then gently drift away, Choose Your Weapon is much more restless; Shaolin Monk Motherfunk curls back upon itself, Palms gorgeous vocals leading the way, until a fiending synth riff caps it all off. A six minute gauntlet, its the first (and only) warning shot allowed. Weapons prog is strong and its here to stay.
A moment of bliss. As Simon Mavins synthesizer paints huge pastel waves, Palm longs for someonean artisan dreamer who can lead her farther down the path. Laputa is essentially a mood exercise, bringing to mind blooming forests and glittering stars as it gracefully swirls in and out of view. Palms lyrics add to the effect as she croons out a roster of hazy nouns, the best being Miyazaki frontier. Choose Your Weaponand Laputa especiallynails the sort of odd wonder that underlines much of Japanese anime and makes floating castles in the sky seem perfectly natural.
Here, its important to pause and take stock. With Shaolin Monk Motherfunk and Laputa, Hiatus Kaiyote have demonstrated their new LPs yin and yang: knotty and restless prog-grooving balanced out by slow easy drifts. Choose Your Weapon motors at these two main speeds and while its a gorgeous ride its also easy to feel lost. It will take numerous listens for all these sections and interludes to fully download into our memory banks; for now, keep plugged in and keep pressing on.
Creations Part One
On whats essentially an extended intro to Borderline With My Atoms, Hiatus Kaiyote make it obvious theyve been listening to Flying Lotus.
Things quickly come back into focus as Palms guitar, brighter and stronger than anything heard on Tawk Tomahawk, leads the way in. The band flips itself playfully over and over again, but always returns to a central groove that serves as reference. When the track premiered this spring, Palm underlined her mention of the Jerhico rose, a plant that can lay dormant a century of drought and then flower at the first hint of rain. Breathing Underwater is a song of overpowering loveI could breathe you underwaterscrawled across a morphing parchment. Its also a tribute to my musical hero Stevie Wonder, Palm said.
Many notes pulse like Tokyos LEDs and we get the feel of engines boosting, of actual weapons been locked and loaded. On Atari, Hiatus Kaiyote shifts from Final Fantasy verses to Sonic the Hedghog choruses engineered by Mosss slunk drum-n-bass beat. Atari has found a way to bottle the joy of hitting the Boost Button from old 16-bit days gone by. This is just pure musical exuberancea band chasing their fun while we all reap the rewards.
Excellent follow-up to a fantastic debut. In a lot of ways, this one is a bit more accessible, but without losing an ounce of that truly original sound that first caught my attention. That soulful, funky, jazzy, off-the-wall vibe is all over this thing, and its incredible from start to finish. Everything is there, and if I may add, its especially incredible through a good set of headphones
Hiatus Kaiyote played their first gig at the Bohemian Masquerade Ball among sword swallowers, fire twirlers and gypsy death core bands  a setting that suited their eclectic nature. Nai Palm had actually worked as fire dancer in Melbourne before she focused on music. The musician Taylor McFerrin came across Hiatus Kaiyote on tour in Australia, and soon the word spread like wildfire. "Everyone who has come in contact with it has promoted it," says Nai Palm. "Questlove and Erykah Badu have gone out of their way to promote the band. There's been so much support from the community of musicians locally and internationally. As a musician that's what it's about." Stereogum singled out Hiatus Kaiyote as a "Band to Watch." Gilles Peterson named them the Breakthrough Artist of 2013. Hiatus Kaiyote first released Tawk Tomahawk on their own last year and are now re-issuing the album on the Sony Masterworks' imprint Flying Buddha.
At the core of their sound is an untethered quality that links them to the wide-open landscape of Australia. "I feel a strong bond to where we're from," says Bender. "Everything happened the way it was, because that's where we were, that's where we're from and that's who we are in the environment."