The fourth album of the Australian R&B-neo-soul-jazz-funk band — comprising Nai Palm, Paul Bender, Simon Mavin and Perrin Moss — is a condensed galactic musical journey of love, soul revival and purging
Australian R&B-neo-soul-jazz-funk band Hiatus Kaiyote released their fourth album Love Heart Cheat Code last month, levelling up their repertoire in terms of lyrics, melody, rhythm and the brave sonic textures that adorn their complex yet rooted musical palette. Having grown a tribe of their own unique listeners for a decade, their approach to music is experiential, educational, intelligent, experimental, psychedelic as well as child-like.
My introduction to Hiatus Kaiyote was through their song Mobius Streak from their debut album Tawk Tomahawk (2012). What struck me was the daring confluence of flamenco-style guitar plucking with mystical electronic elements. A signature trait in every Kaiyote album is the handing over of keys to listeners to deconstruct, reconstruct and assimilate their own language of dense poetry, silence and music.
An ephemeral quality exists within their song compositions that sometimes deprives or overwhelms the listener with cliffhanging lyrics or orchestrated dissonance. The emphasis of the experience is to float within the songs like invisible vapour inside a cloud and not to enter a state of completion or resolution. As our repetitive listening gains momentum, these songs slowly condense to a library of raindrops in our memory. The effervescent Nai Palm, on vocals and the guitars, weaves every song painstakingly through her quirky lyrical bravado, unusual chord stabs and robust voice.
The powerhouse songwriter Simon Mavin, who plays the keys and synthesizer, is a genius in terms of leads, synth texture choices as well as the neo-soul chord progressions. One of my favourite songs in the latest album, Longcat, is a short 1.5-minute track starting off with a simple arpeggio gradually accumulating so many different layers towards the end while the lyrics simply talks about ‘a cat being the longest cat in the world’.
This song reminded me of another song from their debut album, Ocelot, resonating with Nai Palm’s love for animals and the natural world. I would not prefer to call the words in Nai Palm’s songs as lyrics since lyrics sometimes connote a predefined structure and a forceful directionality of process. The poetry she writes for her songs reflects her influences, her dexterity with words, her malleable sense of rhythm and a genuine love for the beauty of the world in its different forms.
In Love Heart Cheat Code, the first track, Dreamboat, initiates us into a galactic journey to a new home, placing us in a musical vehicle of orchestral arpeggio with ambient sounds of water to create the atmosphere needed to enter the next track, Telescope. The love for outer space and rising curiosity for heavenly bodies is inherent in this catchy song where the listeners are made to feel like they are stargazing, contemplating their place in the universe.
Nai’s vocal prowess takes centre stage
The band has a history of working with polyrhythmic time signatures, often preferring an unusual choice of percussive elements. The drummer Perrin Moss’s vintage and stylish drum-kit looks like it has been assembled with archived objects domesticated over time like museum pieces, including ethnic instruments and different kinds of bells or ribbons attached to his hi-hats. Perrin hooks listeners with his nonchalant way of approaching complex time signatures and sudden shifts within songs. His fluidity in rhythm is highlighted in the quartet’s 2015 song, By Fire. The other standout and popular song in the latest album — Make friends — has one of the tastiest bass lines and grooves played by the ace bassist Paul Bender.
This playful yet socially relevant song with the hook-line, ‘You don’t make friends, you recognize them’, explores casual friendships and dating situations in today’s world, commenting on how our inner conscience works while making new friends, quite often betraying our true personalities by posing as the popular or the appeaser. Real and simple friendships are all about the gut feeling. The song also speaks about the conundrum of sensitive individuals desperately searching for true companionship and attention in a hyper information era of endless swipes fuelling artificial relationships.
One of the catchy lines in the song: ‘Too many people, some of them rotten, Where are the good ones, how do we find them?’ The other popular song ‘Everything’s beautiful’, on a 3/4 time signature, has a funky dance feel to it with some intricate fingerpicking on electric guitar and a guiding bass line, with Nai’s vocal prowess taking the forefront. The range of her vocal abilities has always been fascinating for listeners all over the world. She can go from a teenage squeaky voice to a mature hoarse texture to that of an expert soprano within seconds in the same song.
Mysterious melody and hypnotic rhythms govern songs like Dimitiri and Love Heart Cheat Code, including a slightly detuned electric guitar strum in the latter. In Dimitri, the drums playfully make us sway in and out of a fixed groove, sometimes slowing down on purpose or speeding up, keeping the anticipation of tease alive. Like most of their songs, an underlying tension lies inherent throughout the length and pushes us into a diaphanous memory of their older songs.
The celebration of ethereal love
In terms of track placement and concept flow, this album definitely carries flashbacks of the grammar they followed in their first two albums — Tawk Tomahawk and Choose Your Weapon (2015). The spoken word, at times, effectively dissolves into the musical elements, leading to the hint of a new aural totem, forcing us to repeat the track and scroll the lyric sheet. Simultaneous meaning and musicality make every song age well over time. To give you an example of their innovative play with sound and spoken word, here’s a particular line from the song Dimitri: “If you sit still/Tilt your head right/Click your heels three times.” While this line plays thrice, a finger-snapping sound plays every time she says the word ‘click’, instilling an appeal to nod.
While the album also traverses through elements of peaceful R&B in tracks like How to meet yourself, they take it one step ahead in this album with a very aggressive climactic ending through the two songs — Cinnamon Temple and White Rabbit. It is here that the total dissolution of the world they built up throughout the album begins to take place with highly distorted bass and synthesized highly paced vocals moving towards a child-like chanting and a provokingly horror-like soundscape bringing home the narrative of a dark yet playful euphemism we call life.
Unlike the mundane auto-tuned pop songs of today with heavily processed vocals, Hiatus Kaiyote’s latest album, magnificently produced by Brazil-based music producer Mario Caldato Jr., manages to hook listeners with their intuitive, raw play on melody, culture and language. Hiatus Kaiyote is one of the very few bands nurturing a new form of jazz, funk and soul music towards a ‘future soul’ where words, instruments, percussion and soundscape elements provoke a reinterpretation of the concept of fixed genres.
Nai Palm says in an interview, “Music is life itself for me. It makes the world beautiful. Our music is very cinematic. When I am creating it’s like writing scores for movies that don’t exist”. Love Heart Cheat Code is a memorable journey of an unexpected urge to celebrate an ethereal thought of love and a perfect occasion for the music fraternity to take a hiatus to appreciate the lyrical wizardry and rib-tickling textures of this passionately original band.
