In the late-’00s, Magnus August Høiberg repped for his native Norway at the DMC World DJ Championships under the handle of DJ Final. But by a few years later, Høiberg went with a name more befitting of his playful musical style. As Cashmere Cat, he began uploading to Soundcloud his spin on the fixtures in the pop firmament—be it Lana Del Ray, Drake, or 2 Chainz—materializing in the spaces between R&B, pop, trap, EDM, and indie, never quite beholden to any one sound. Moving against type is one of Cashmere Cat’s keenest tricks: garlanding Starrah, 2 Chainz, and Tory Lanez in stately harpsichords, swaddling Britney in whispers and echoes, twining Kanye’s vocoder vocals with Pulitzer Prize-winning vocalist/composer Caroline Shaw on “Wolves.” So the prospect of him finally having some major label clout to put such curious ideas before Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and the Weeknd was tantalizing.
A few of his previous employers appear on 9, an album chock full of guests but few of the notable features that originally put Cashmere Cat at the nexus of pop and electronic music. For most of this slender ten-track, 34-minute album, Høiberg winds up at the median of the mainstream, nimbly padding away from both the gluttonous hooks and towering thrills of either sound. And almost every voice within is processed to the point of being indistinguishable from one another. Rather than the upending of norms on his previous work, 9 offers little in the way of new thrills.
No drop no problem, as EDM has moved away from that rollercoaster trick the past few years, but Cashmere Cat still tries to wring drama out of the faux builds. After the wheezing, Auto-Tuned proclamation from Kehlani “to go all damned night” on opener “Night Night,” Cashmere Cat builds up not to a frenzied, Red Bull-raising anthem, but rather a latticework of string quartet and choral voices. On the standout “Quit,” he again works with Ariana Grande, dropping her yearning vocal into a near-void of a track. As a muffled snare ratchets up the tension, the song then dissolves into fluttering butterflies and what may as well be a nose flute patch.
Cashmere Cat’s collaboration with Selena Gomez and Tory Lanez on “Trust Nobody” is 9’s best pop moment. It's low-key, toning down Cashmere Cat’s excesses while accentuating his nimble way of a flipping a trap beat into something slick as massage oil. The mashing of trap-pop gunshots, ethereal ambience, and owl hoot on “Love Incredible” (co-produced with SOPHIE) finds a good counterpart in former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello, delivering mellifluous high notes and growls alike.
The closest Cashmere Cat comes to big tent festival fare is on “Victoria’s Veil,” an instrumental that tweaks tiny blips and jazz finger keys and cagily builds towards a much-promised peak. In a few months time, it might soon be better known for making hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers put their hands in the air for…the Alan Parsons Project. “Wild Love,” foregoes beats entirely, Cashmere Cat instead suspending the Weeknd’s warped voice and Francis and the Lights’ Prismizer in a zero-G field. If only Høiberg could have refrained from triggering a maddening squelch not unlike Q*Bert hopping around a pyramid, rupturing the otherwise gaseous effect of the track.
But it’s not as cringeworthy as “9 (After Coachella)” his team-up with MØ and second track with SOPHIE. MØ’s voice easily segues towards the confessional singer-songwriter mode (versus her turn as near-anonymous EDM vocalist), but is the 2017 admission that “I like the way you spread confusion” an ode to a rowdy bro or to Putin-sown discord? In the hands of some, Japanese digital tones are judiciously deployed to tasteful effect, but the sound that Cashmere Cat and co-producers Benny Blanco and SOPHIE go for here plops “9 (After Coachella)” between the flippers of Flower Drum Song: The Pinball Game. It is an instance of Cashmere Cat’s album being hijacked by the PC Music aesthetic, clanging and cloying in equal measure. Like so much of this album. his sound becomes muddled in the mainstream and dissolves into the background.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly implied that SOPHIE has recorded for the PC Music label.
