Mount Kimbie are two friends who met in college, didn't exactly have the same taste in music, made some field recordings, dumped them into Fruity Loops, and started working. Their first two EPs, Sketch on Glass and Maybes, came out on the British dubstep label Hotflush, but didn't sound like much like their peers-- and that's one of the reasons they were so good. No pomp, no anxiety, no apocalyptic drops, no airhorns. In a recent video interview, Dom Maker-- one half of the group-- talked about his appreciation for TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is probably not the way to impress dance-music purists, but it is a way to prove you're creative enough to ignore genre purity. It's why Crooks & Lovers is highly anticipated by such a small community of listeners-- and also why it has such a good chance of being appreciated by a larger one.
If they have forebears, it's a group like Boards of Canada, who used machines to make music more convincingly pastoral than most folk bands. The funk on Crooks is too intimate to be whored out to clubs. It's beat music for hearth and home. Beat music for your cycling commute, or for gardening. The snare on "Before I Move Off" is the cluck of someone's tongue against the roof of their mouth. When "Carbonated" climaxes, the sound of rain comes into the mix-- and a sprinkle, not a downpour. Even the titles are humble: "Mayor" (and not "President" or "Dictator" or "King"); "Ode to Bear"; "Field". And in the rare moment when the music gets agitated-- like on "Blind Night Errand"-- they still avoid being grandiose. Dubstep's signature bass wobble turns into the burp of plumbing. A big synthesizer sweep sounds like the air conditioner turning on. The surprise-- to me, at least-- is that despite the politeness of the overall sound, it's still detailed enough to sound even better loud than on headphones.
Nothing on Crooks stands out the way "Maybes" or "Sketch on Glass" did, and though it may be a generous fan's rationalization, I'd just say this just makes it an album rather than a single or an EP. Recording a full-length at all is a rare gesture in a genre where a producer-- like Joy Orbison, for example-- can release 10 or 15 minutes of music and still be considered one of the best of the year. Dubstep-- and dance music in general-- is a musical hemisphere whose "great albums" often don't seem to have any self-awareness of how an album can work, but Crooks, for what it's worth, does-- it rises, it falls, it rises again, and it ends. Thirty-five minutes, frequent sparkling, no fuss.
When an interviewer from The Fader said he'd tried to search for Mount Kimbie on Google Maps but couldn't find anything, Kai Campos-- the other half of the group-- explained, "It's a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time." Not a cloud-scraping peak where the sunsets burn pink and white for miles, not a metaphor for the grandeur of creation, just a small town with reliable public transportation-- a beautiful, small, and clever answer for a beautiful, small, and clever album.
