There exists a lovely, hazy video of a young Mount Kimbie performing in a church with a young James Blake. They're playing Kimbie's breakthrough "Maybes" (which later received an epochal Blake remix), and near the end of the song, the three of them-- Blake and Kimbie principales Dominic Maker and Kai Campos-- take on the song's prying, percussive vocal riff. Maybe it's the setting, but the moment feels big. Friends singing with friends, tripping into pop music, figuring it out on the fly. Blake would develop those instincts, finding plenty of acclaim as a singer songwriter. Kimbie spent the ensuing years folding in on themselves, making pretty electro-acoustic vignettes. They released a couple of EPs and, eventually, a debut album, Crooks & Lovers, that treated the U.K. electronic scene like a bonsai tree, pruning the unruly until something manicured and personal remained.
On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, their second album and first for Warp, they alter course. They take more risks, particularly with voices: their own, often, and with unexpected collaborator King Krule. The duo, which has valued coherency and neatness, move towards live instrumentation, peppering their fizzy electronics with thumbed bass lines and crumpling drums. The music that results remains small and detailed, but also allows the humid outside air to contaminate it. If Cold Spring is not an unbridled reach for a brass ring, it's at least an acknowledgment that such a ring exists.
Don't let those instruments-- including the bossy brass sounds that open the album-- throw you, though. Cold Spring is a distinctly electronic album, and a modern one as well. Dolorous electric pianos and stuttering electronics constantly bother the rhythm section. And while Cold Spring owes debts-- to Four Tet and Fridge, to Oval, to wonky stylists like Isotope 217-- its collection of tones, syncopation, and lurch is contemporary and distinct. There is no nostalgia, no dubby decay or wistfulness, locked up in Cold Spring. This alone is refreshing.
Cold Spring succeeds because Maker and Campos go out of their way to foil their default, kempt state. The most noticeable example of which is the addition of King Krule, a.k.a. gravel-voiced youngster Archy Marshall. His churlish, marble-mouthed tone is so at odds with the Kimbie universe that when it first arrives, during the opening moments of "You Took Your Time", it sounds like someone aggressively tousling the band's meticulously combed hair. Krule is a magnetic presence, fronting on a murder-- "Now did you see me/ I killed a man"-- and slowly chewing words over a distended synthesizers and thin percussion, resulting in something of a grime ballad. When he returns later on "Meter, Pale, Tone" he expertly summarizes the odd, personal charm of Mount Kimbie: "Crack a toe/ It was the loudest of sounds."
Make and Campos take turns at the mic themselves, reprising the blocky sing-chants of "Maybes" to pleasant effect. It reminds me of shape-note singing in its pacing and expression: limited voices, irregular melodic shifts. It's not pop music, but on tracks like lead single "Made to Stray" and "Blood and Form" their voices balance on the arrangements' edges and tightrope to the finish. The instrumental tracks have a broader, almost post-rock feel to them, offering jazzy percussion, needle-threaded bass workouts, and heaving atmospheres. The resplendent "Break Well" and the closing "Fall Out" prove them still capable of erratic beauty.
For these gains they've sacrificed some of their agility, the crisp snaps and cracks of Crooks & Lovers, and their easy self-containment. But Cold Spring is miles from epic or strained, and it's comfortable with its imbalance. It feels like a personal triumph: On album two Mount Kimbie were a smidge more ambitious, something that will be true whether or not the outside world deigns to notice.
