Mount Kimbie – Love What Survives
Mount Kimbie's third album, Love What Survives, offers a scattergun approach to ideas, sounds and voices, and it could be their greatest record yet
Dominic Maker and Kai Campos have shape-shifted again. Their 2010 debut Crooks & Lovers was responsible for the shape of post-noughties UK electronic music, and two years later Cold Spring Fault Less Youth doubled down on their critical acclaim, but through live-instrumentation, introspective floor-fillers that blurred the lines between synthetic and organic sound.
For their third LP, Mount Kimbie have lost that previously razor sharp focus. Love What Survives offers a scattergun approach to ideas, sounds and voices, and it could be their greatest record yet. With a looser grip, Mount Kimbie dip and dive through myriad musical worlds, accompanied by some seriously talented pals. Micachu (aka BAFTA nominee Mica Levi), King Krule, Andrea Balency (the band’s live singer) and James Blake guest on tracks so diverse they barely fit on the same album… and yet.
Mount Kimbie have a gift for conjuring that unique, insular feeling of a world rushing by while you’re lost in your headphones, and that’s the key thread through Love What Survives. King Krule’s Archy Marshall spits out lyrics in brutal bursts on Blue Train Lines, over an anxious beat that ticks and ticks and ticks. The following instrumental track Audition heals those wounds with a woozy, nostalgia that starts out a lot like The Cure’s A Forest.
Blake’s cameo on the record’s last track is understated, as his unmistakable vocals and twinkly keys are near drowned out by submerged, watery synth. Listen to this record on loop, because when the opener kicks in again, and picks out abrupt, industrial rhythms from that same synthy gloom, you’ll see the logic in Mount Kimbie’s gentle chaos.
Listen to: Four Years and One Day, Blue Train Lines, Audition